Shelly Chan is a historian of modern and global China and an alumna of the UCSC History graduate program. She received her Ph.D. in 2009 and previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2011-20) and the University of Victoria (2009-11). Most recently, she was also director of the Title VI-funded Center for East Asian Studies at UW-Madison and a visiting senior fellow with the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore.
Coming to UCSC amidst the challenges of the pandemic and wildfires, Chan has nonetheless found it easy to feel the joy of coming “home.”
A specialist in the impact of Chinese migration and diaspora, Professor Chan is the author of Diaspora’s Homeland: Modern China in the Age of Global Migration. Published by Duke University Press in 2018, the book was shortlisted for the 2019 International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) Humanities Book Prize. The reading committee noted:
Diaspora’s Homeland offers a re-interpretation of China’s relationship with its diaspora in temporal terms, restoring to China’s history a series of “diaspora moments” which fundamentally constitute the emergence of Chinese nationalism over the twentieth century. In accessible and elegant prose, covering major periods of change, from early twentieth century reform and revolution to late twentieth century return migration, it argues that modern China is in an important sense a product of the invention of a homeland by its diasporic populations, thus connecting the fields of Asian American studies, modern Chinese history and diaspora studies in productive and engaging ways.
Continuing to develop transnational approaches to the Chinese past, Chan is working on two new projects. One of them focuses on the history of “home-goings” involving China, Taiwan, and the diaspora in the Cold War. Another project explores the imagined geography of Nanyang (“the South Seas”), a major site of global migration linking maritime China and Southeast Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both projects seek to view Chinese history and culture through larger yet overlooked frames.
This fall, Professor Chan is delighted to work with students in her courses, HIS 80C: Global China and HIS 140D: Recent Chinese History, both designed for the new “Asia and the Pacific” undergraduate program. “Global China” explores the long history of globalization through China and fulfills the GE PR-E requirement. Students will be guided through a series of group projects on the porcelain trade, revolutionaries, kungfu cinema, and China’s rise at the present moment. “Recent Chinese history” explains the evolution of the People’s Republic of China in both national and international contexts. Both courses call attention to the social, political, and transnational dimensions of Chinese history.
Deeply shaped by UCSC’s culture of asking big questions and thinking across disciplines, Chan is proud to join the History faculty. At this difficult time, she particularly looks forward to getting to know the richly diverse students and colleagues here, and hopes to contribute to the building of a connected and resilient community at UCSC.
