MIT Global Languages

Emma

Teng

T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations, History Faculty

Director, Global Languages

eteng@mit.edu

14N-303

617-253-4536

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Bio

Emma J. Teng is the T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations at MIT. She holds an appointment on the History faculty and is a MacVicar Faculty Fellow.

Teng teaches courses on Chinese culture, Chinese migration history, Asian American history, East Asian culture, and women’s and gender studies. She earned her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, where she specialized in Chinese studies and Asian American studies. Her first book, Taiwan's Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683-1895 (Harvard 2004), a study of Chinese colonial discourses on Taiwan, places the China-Taiwan relationship in the historical context of Chinese imperial expansionism. Her latest book, Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China and Hong Kong, 1842-1943 (University of California 2013) examines ideas concerning racial intermixing and the lived experiences of mixed families in China and the US between 1842 and 1943. Teng is currently researching early Chinese educational migration to the US.

Research Areas / Expertise: Chinese Diaspora Studies; Mixed-Race Studies; Chinese Frontier Studies; Asian American Studies

Research

Chinese Educational Migration: 1840-1940

This project seeks to expand our understanding of early Chinese migration to the US by uncovering vital aspects of Chinese educational migration in the years between 1840 and 1940.

China4kids

China4Kids is a K-12 outreach project designed to promote understanding of Chinese culture and history at the elementary level in Massachusetts. The content for the project has been selected to support the Massachusetts History and Social Science Curriculum Framework, Grade 4 Learning Standards (4.1-4.6).

Critical Mixed Race: Chinese Eurasians, 1843-1943

This project traces the evolution of ideas concerning East-West intermixing in China, Hong Kong, and the US in the years between 1842 and 1943, as well as the lived experiences of mixed/Eurasian families that formed through the histories of migration, diaspora, trade and other encounters on both sides of the Pacific.

Publications

Select Articles in Refereed Journals

2017 “Hong Kong's Eurasian "Web" Viewed through the Lens of Inter-Asian Studies, Journal of Asian Studies.
2017 “The Asian Turn in Mixed Race Studies: Retrospects and Prospects.” Asia Pacific Perspectives, vol. 14, no. 2, Spring 2017: 80-85.
2016 - "Looking Again at Taiwan’s Lü Hsiu-lien: A Female Vice President or a Feminist Vice President?” Women's Studies International Forum (2016), pp. 92-102.
2014 - “Other As Self?: The ‘Civilized Barbarian’ in Dong Yue’s ‘Poetic Exposition on Korea’” in Marion Eggert et al eds., special theme on Imagining Korea, Imagining the World. Accounts of Travels to and from Korea, Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung (BJOAF) [Bochum Yearbook for East Asian Studies], 30 pp.
2012 - "A Problem for Which There Is No Solution": Eurasians and the Specter of Degeneration in New York's Chinatown," Journal of Asian American Studies, October 2012, pp. 271-298.
2009 - “Reinventing Home: Images of Mobility and Returns in Eurasian Memoirs” (Zaizao “Jiaxiang”: Ouyayiren jiyilu zhong de yidong yixiang), Center for Chinese Studies Research Series, Number 12. Taipei: Center for Chinese Studies (Hanxue yanjiu zhongxin), pp. 355-388.
2007 - “Taiwan in the Chinese Imagination, 17th-19th Centuries,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus.
2006 - “Eurasian Hybridity in Chinese Utopian Visions: From ‘One World’ to a ‘Society Based on Beauty’ and Beyond,” positions: east asia cultures critique (Volume 14.1), pp. 131-163.
1999 - “Taiwan as a Living Museum: Tropes of Anachronism in Late-Imperial Chinese Travel Writing,” The Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 59.2, pp. 445-484.
1998 - “An Island of Women: The Discourse of Gender in Qing Travel Accounts of Taiwan,” International History Review 20.2, pp. 353-370. Reprinted as chapter entitled “An Island of Beautiful Women: The Discourse on Gender in Ch’ing Travel Accounts of Taiwan” in Women in New Taiwan: Gender Roles and Gender Consciousness in a Changing Society, eds. Catherine Farris, Murray Rubinstein and Lee Angru, M.E. Sharpe, (2004), pp. 41-58. Reprinted as a chapter in Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, eds. Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne, Duke University Press, (2005), pp. 38-53.

Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842–1943

2013

Emma Teng

In the second half of the nineteenth century, global labor migration, trade, and overseas study brought China and the United States into close contact, leading to new cross-cultural encounters that brought mixed-race families into being. Yet the stories of these families remain largely unknown.

Taiwan's Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683-1895

2004

Emma Teng

For centuries, the Chinese considered Taiwan a "land beyond the seas," a "ball of mud" inhabited by "naked and tattooed savages." The incorporation of this island into the Qing empire in the seventeenth century and its evolution into a province by the late nineteenth century involved a reconsideration of imperial geograp

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