Jiayi Chen, assistant professor of East Asian languages and cultures, and Uluğ Kuzuoğlu, assistant professor of history, have both received early career fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies. Part of the Luce/ACLS Program in China Studies, the fellowship program awards recent PhDs up to $45,000 to carry out research and writing on a scholarly project.
Chen and Kuzuoğlu are among the eight emerging scholars to receive a long-term fellowship for research on China’s histories, cultures, geopolitics, art, and global impact. Chen’s research focuses on gaming and literary culture in early modern China. Kuzuoğlu’s project explores artificial intelligence and pseudoscience in the Sinosphere.
Kuzuoğlu said the fellowship will be critical for developing his research on the history of data, capitalism, and artificial intelligence in China and East Asia. “I hope my research will shed light on how and when data became an economic resource for extraction across the globe and help us rethink the consequences of this deep transformation that affects every minute of our lives," he said.
The fellowship will allow Chen to work full-time on her first book tentatively entitled “The Early Modern Ludic: Gaming and Literary Culture in China.” “I hope to explore the critical potential of games that inform how people read, learned, and thought in early modern China, and to reflect on what ‘the ludic’ means in a pre-digital era,” she said.
Earlier this year, Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit, assistant professor of music, also received an ACLS fellowship for his project on race and sovereignty in the imperial music of Siam.
