Research BackgroundMy research is centered on three interrelated threads: the intersections of performance, politics, and popularity in modern China, modern Japan, and the international avant-garde; the interactions among folk, urban, and popular cultures and political propaganda; and gender and class representations in literary, performing, cinematic, and visual arts. For the past fifteen years, I have conducted interdisciplinary, multilingual and multi-site research in Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Furukawa, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Singapore, Stockholm, Nijmegen, Leipzig, Heidelberg, Leiden, and Taiwan in the broadly-defined fields of modern Chinese literature and culture, modern Japanese studies, performance studies, modernist studies, comparative literature, and cultural studies.My first book, The Avant-garde and the Popular in Modern China: Tian Han and the Intersection of Performance, Politics, and Popularity (University of Michigan Press, 2014), reveals avant-garde performance as an important political force shaped by, and in turn shaping, popular culture in modern China. The insights gained from writing my first book informed two projects. In my second book, The Global White Snake (Michigan, 2021), I set out to further explore the intersections of feminine performance, gender politics, and popular culture through the multimedia metamorphoses of the White Snake tale in the context of the Cold War and contemporary cultural productions in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English. In my third book and documentary film project, Profound Propaganda: the International Avant-garde and Modern China, I attempt to harvest the rich findings regarding the relationship between the international avant-garde (represented by the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens and the African American artist Paul Robeson) and modern China in my first book, and extend its critical engagement both historically and globally.