Yushu Geng is a cultural historian of modern China. She received her BA in History and MA in Modern History from Durham University and obtained an MPhil in Gender Studies and a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining NYU Shanghai, she worked as a postdoc at Trinity College Dublin between 2021 and 2023, investigating the changing meanings of childhood in twentieth-century China. Her PhD project looks at the circulation and regulation of Chinese-language obscene publications in Republican China and colonial Singapore.

Her broader research interests include history of gender and sexuality, print culture, feminism, and global history. Her regional focus is China, but during her PhD training she also branched out to investigate the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, with a focus on Chinese communities in Singapore.

Portions of Yushu’s PhD thesis have been published under the title ‘What is Obscenity? Morality and Modernity in 1920s China’ in China Perspectives. She co-edited Rethinking Childhood in Modern Chinese History (Routledge, forthcoming) with Dr Isabella Jackson, in which she contributed a book chapter and a co-authored Introduction. She has a forthcoming co-authored article on the transnational marketing in early twentieth century India and China in Historical Journal. She is currently revising her PhD thesis into a book manuscript and working on two side projects: one about masculinity and the Chinese Modern Boy in 1920s-1930s China and the other about child sexuality and sex education in Republican China.