A historian by training specializing in modern China (19th–20th centuries), my current research interests weave together four interrelated threads.
Advertising as an Industry in Modern China
From the nineteenth century to the Communist revolution of 1949, advertisements became ubiquitous in China. They filled newspaper pages, flooded city streets, penetrated deep into the countryside, and spread along railroads and rivers. This research moves beyond the study of commercial images as reflections of consumer imaginaries to approach advertisements as material artifacts and social products of an emerging global capitalism. Rather than asking whether advertising was imported from the West or (re)invented locally, I focus on the social actors—professional agencies, advertisers, newspaper editors, and contemporary critics—who contributed to the emergence of an advertising industry in China. I am particularly interested in how advertising became not merely a background element but a social force that actively fashioned urban spaces, municipal policies, and everyday life. Drawing on newspapers, professional writings, personal papers, street photographs, and municipal archives, I combine historical research with digital methods, including relational databases and GIS, to map the professional networks and spatial footprint of advertising in Shanghai’s streets and newspapers.
This research has resulted in two monographs (Madmen in Shanghai, 2024; Between Public and Market, 2025), several journal articles, and the MADSpace research platform.
Transnational Elites in China: The Case of the Rotary Club
This project moves beyond semi-colonialism and nationalism as the primary frameworks for studying modern China to investigate how Chinese and non-Chinese elites interacted on the ground. Taking the Rotary Club— a transnational elite organization founded in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century —as a case study, I examine a network of more than thirty clubs across China whose members represented over twenty nationalities, reflecting the highly transnational character of Republican China. I explore how Rotarians interacted at multiple scales, from individual clubs to China, Asia, and the wider world, and negotiated Republican politics and international diplomacy despite their self-proclaimed non-political stance. Comparing clubs in treaty ports, Japanese-occupied territories, and inland cities also reveals both the reach and limitations of transnationalism across China’s territorial and social mosaic. Drawing on Who’s Who directories, biographical dictionaries, organizational and personal archives, newspapers, and online encyclopedias, I examine three dimensions: club membership as a reflection of local elite society and its global connections; engagement in community service and the promotion of new ethics of professionalism and philanthropy; and Rotarians’ entanglement with national politics and international diplomacy during a period marked by rising nationalism, the Sino-Japanese War, World War II, and the postwar civil war. This mesohistorical approach, centered on a clearly defined and contextualized social layer, seeks to overcome the limitations of both nation-state frameworks and transnational approaches insufficiently attentive to national boundaries and territorial constraints.
This research forms the basis of my Habilitation à diriger des recherches (HDR) and is intended to result in a monograph by 2030. I have already published a book chapter and a research article on this topic.
Mapping the Chinese Mediasphere
The rise of the periodical press transformed the production and circulation of information in late imperial and Republican China. From the mid-nineteenth century to 1949, newspapers and periodicals multiplied and diversified in genre, content, layout, and periodicity, while their readership expanded both numerically and geographically. Scholars have extensively studied the press as both a historical source and an object of inquiry, examining its role as a public sphere and vehicle for reformist and revolutionary ideas, the emergence of modern journalism, and its relationship to gender, advertising, consumerism, and other aspects of modern Chinese history. Yet much of this scholarship focuses on individual publications, often the most accessible and best preserved, which represent only the tip of the iceberg of a rich and dynamic media ecosystem. The expansion of digitized newspaper collections since the 1990s has reinforced this tendency while encouraging a focus on textual content that can overlook the material and economic conditions shaping production, circulation, audiences, and impact.
This research seeks to reconstruct the media landscape of modern China in order to contextualize and compare individual publications. Drawing on newspaper directories, professional publications, newspapers, and archival and printed sources, I use statistical analysis, GIS, and network analysis to extract, organize, analyze, and visualize newspaper data: : their lifespans and geographical reach, physical dimensions and layouts, social actors and editorial orientations, advertising strategies, revenues, circulation, and readership.
A preliminary output is Chinese Newscape, an R Shiny application based on the newspaper directories compiled by American journalist Carl Crow, together with an accompanying series of blog posts.
From Digital to AI-Augmented History: Historian–Machine Interactions
This transversal axis cuts across my other research interests. My engagement with computational methods is rooted in concrete historical sources and research questions: addressing questions difficult to tackle through non-computational methods; harnessing digitized and born-digital materials, including online encyclopedias and other web sources; and revealing patterns, connections, and long-term trends across dispersed and multilingual sources. These possibilities are especially relevant in a context of increasingly restricted access to official archives in China. At the same time, computational research requires new forms of digital source criticism. I am interested in the challenges posed by the scale and heterogeneity of digital materials, historical variants, multilingual sources, the complexities of historical Chinese, and imperfect Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Layout Recognition (OLR), all of which affect search results and downstream analyses.
More recently, I have been exploring whether and how AI, and large language models in particular, can augment historical research by overcoming limitations in corpus building, data extraction, and pattern detection, while bridging computational scale and analytical depth. I advocate a hybrid approach in which AI does not replace traditional historical hermeneutics but enters into sustained interaction with historians, triangulating AI-based methods, conventional rule-based computational approaches, and historians’ domain expertise. This requires a transparent and critical approach emphasizing explainability and reproducibility and, whenever possible, the use and adaptation of open-source models rather than exclusive dependence on proprietary APIs. In my own practice, I strive to systematically document the methodological choices underlying my research findings and make the corresponding scripts and workflows publicly available through GitHub, Zenodo, and other open repositories.
I argue that the shift from digital history toward generative AI makes coding skills and a basic understanding of programming increasingly important for historians and humanities scholars at large. Such computational literacy gives us greater methodological autonomy and enables genuine interdisciplinary collaboration with computer scientists, moving beyond a model in which technical tasks are simply delegated to engineers. To put this principle into practice, I have contributed to training workshops and summer schools in digital humanities and have taught students programming skills and computational methods specifically applied to research in the humanities and social sciences.