Professor Denise Y. Ho speaks to James Evans of Harvard’s Fairbank Center for China Studies about her first book, Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China (Cambridge, 2018)

January 18, 2019

Denise Y. Ho is assistant professor of twentieth-century Chinese history at Yale University, and the author of “Curating Revolution: Politics on Display of Mao’s China” (2018). Using a wide variety of primary sources, including Shanghai’s municipal and district archives and oral history, “Curating Revolution” depicts displays of revolution and history, politics and class, and art and science. Analyzing China’s “socialist museums” and “new exhibitions,” Ho demonstrates how Mao-era exhibitionary culture both reflected and made revolution.

Denise Y. Ho is an historian of modern China, with a particular focus on the social and cultural history of the Mao period (1949-1976). She is also interested in urban history, the study of information and propaganda, and material culture. Ho teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on modern and contemporary China, the history of Shanghai, the uses of the past in modern China, and the historiography of the Republican era and the PRC.

The “Harvard on China Podcast” is hosted by James Evans at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.

https://soundcloud.com/fairbank-center/new-exhibitions-and-chinas-cultural-revolution-with-denise-y-ho