Yutong Li is a Postdoctoral Fellow of Global Asia at NYU Shanghai. She received her BA in philosophy from the University of Virginia, and her M.A. in History of Art and Archaeology of East Asia and intensive language (Japanese) from SOAS, University of London, where her thesis won the Frederick Richter Memorial Postgraduate Prize. Before joining NYU Shanghai, she completed her Ph.D. in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University.

Her research reconsiders the early modern Chinese conceptualization of ethnicity and gender through imagery materials. Her current project, titled “The Aesthetics of Alterity: Depictions of the Foreign Other in Jiangnan and Coastal China, 1550s–1660s,” focuses on Chinese depictions of the foreign other (Yi) in workshop paintings, illustrated books, and single-sheet prints produced in response to increasing global maritime interconnectivity. Pivoting from the analysis of top-down dissemination of statecraft ideology, she argues that the circulation of pictures on the open market actively shaped, recalibrated, and—at times—problematized Hua–Yi (Sino-Foreign) dynamics.

Select Publications

• “Beyond the European World.” Co-authored with He Bian (Princeton University), In Sarah Toulalan, eds., Early Modern Bodies (Routledge, forthcoming).
• “Visualizing an Emotional Realm: Dreamscape in Chinese Romance Opera,” Mingdai yanjiu 明代研究 (Journal of Ming Studies) 39, (December 2022): 101–152.
• “Qingdai yuguibi santi 清代玉圭璧三题 [The Agency of Assemblage——On a Jade Gui-bi from the Freer Collection],” translated by Wang Qian 王倩. Meicheng Zaijiu 美成在久 [Orientations], (2019.6): 78–85.

Education

• PhD, Art and Archaeology,
  Princeton University
• MA, History of Art and Archaeology of East Asia and Intensive Language (Japanese)
  SOAS, University of London
• BA, Philosophy
  University of Virginia

Research Interests

• Late Imperial Chinese Art and Visual Culture (1400-1800)
• Transmedial and Transregional Art in East Asia
• Women and Gender Studies
• Constructing “Otherness” in East Asian Art