I am a historian of mass communication under twentieth-century state socialism, with a particular focus on the People’s Republic of China. My research is driven by a desire to understand how power holders utilized new media and technologies of mass outreach, and how people responded to and reclaimed these in the process.
Currently, I am a postdoctoral researcher at Heidelberg University, where I explore these themes through the case of lianhuanhua (Chinese socialist comics) as part of ERC-ChinaComx. I am also preparing my first monograph on the phenomenon of political study and other collective reading practices in socialist China.
You can find details about my past and current work in Bio, and a list of my publications in Texts. My public lectures are listed in Talks; here you can also see where and when I will talk next. Samples of my graphic design and digital humanities projects are in Portfolio. And get in touch via Contact.
Recent publications:
08/09/2026: The ChinaComx Lianhuanhua Publication Dataset, v1.0.0
Zenodo & GitHub | data publication of a CSV dataset with metadata on 38,000+ lianhuanhua06/09/2026: “How to (Machine) Read 38,000 Chinese Comics? Distilling Publication Metadata from Lianhuanhua Catalogues”
EADH Annual Conference | short paper written with Tilen Zupan01/08/2026: The Degeneration of Young Li Changkuan 靑年李長寬的堕落 (1956)
ChinaComx Translations | collective translation & introdocution to the lianhuanhua02/06/2026: “Digital Curatorship, Handling Special Collections, and Lessons Learned from My Pursuit of Historical Photographs of People Reading in China”
The Digital Orientalist | research article
See a list of all my publications here and of my talks here.
More updates:
- #ChinaComx is going ComFor! Our PI and myself are headed to Gießen for the Annual Conference of the Comics Studies Society to present the most recent draft of our joint paper on what we call the #Maoverse: revolutionary heroes, Mao, and the shared universe of Chinese socialist lianhuanhua.
- Tilen and I are travelling to Kraków for this year's EADH conference @eadh2026krakow.bsky.social to talk in detail about the ChinaComx Lianhuanhua Publication Dataset — tomorrow, Wed 16.09, from 13:30 in al. Mickiewicza 9b at @jagiellonskiuni.bsky.social; see eadh2026.confer.uj.edu.pl/programme. [contains quote post or other embedded content]
- Very glad to announce the release of the ChinaComx Lianhuanhua Publication Dataset, v1.0.0! This is the first comprehensive open-access database of over 38k historical Chinese comics' publication records (spanning 1949–1994) with parsed metadata & OCR provenance. Explore at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22661556