At Vision's Edge: Modern China, the United States, and Film

This talk reconstructs the lives and afterlives of images and imaging technologies that linked Chinese communities, American missions, and Sino-US encounters over the first half of the twentieth century. Cameras accompanied Protestant and Catholic missionaries as they undertook cultural, political, and religious projects in Republican China through the first years of the People’s Republic. These evolving visual practices and products ultimately escaped their missionary molds and entered transpacific perspectives, coloring Chinese engagements with the world alongside US views of modern China and East Asia. This talk explores intersections between image-making, Sino-US imaginations, and historical trajectories of visual material – all of which framed transnational experiences on both sides of the lens.

Speaker

Joseph W. Ho is a center associate at the University of Michigan Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies and the academic program manager for the University of Michigan Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. He is a historian of modern China and Taiwan, Sino-US encounters, and transnational visual culture and media. He has published essays on his research in several edited volumes, as well as the UCLA Historical Journal, U.S. Catholic Historian, and Education About Asia. Ho is the co-author of Time Exposures: Catholic Photography and the Evolution of Modern China (Hong Kong University Press, forthcoming in 2025) and the author of Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2022).

Host or Publisher Sigur Center for Asian Studies at GW