Research interests: global early modern, digital humanities, travel writing, mobility studies, book history, postcolonial criticism

Zhonghua’s doctoral dissertation, tentatively titled “Global Italy and its Orient: travelers, networks and cultural mobility between Italy and China 1500-1800”, investigates the entanglements of people, texts and ideas between Italy and China, two key “nodes of convergence” of the Eurasian networks during the first global age. Drawing on theories and methodologies in global history, network analysis, mobility studies and book history, the dissertation traces the complex trajectories of travelers of the Italian peninsula, who traveled physically or imaginatively to the Far East, in order to recover their multiple voices that contributed to shaping identities, cosmopolitan perspectives, and Orientalist sensitivity in myriad ways in early modern Italy and beyond. The study aims to provide evidence of specific case studies to challenge notions of linear and teleological development, and illusions of fixity and wholeness of culture. It also serves as a corrective to methodological nationalism, Eurocentrism, parochialism and ethnocentrism. Zhonghua has received admission to the library and residence in Vittore Branca Research Center, Fondazione Giorgio Cini to conduct research on her dissertation topics in Venice in 2022.

Zhonghua is heavily engaged in Digital Humanities(DH). Her research project “Characterizing early modern imaginary geographies: an NLP approach” applies NLP-driven text analysis and other quantitative approaches to investigate Orientalist discourse in early modern publications. It offers the model to study the characterization of “imaginative geographies” on a large, corpus-level scale. She’s invited to present her project in The Berkeley Digital Humanities Working Group. Zhonghua has been working on Jesuit Sino-European communication networks in the early modern period with computational network analysis tools, and presented her work on the panel “Textual and Literary Relations across Early Modern Eurasia” at MLA 2022 annual convention.

Zhonghua further brings her expertise in Global History and Digital Humanities in her language, literature and culture pedagogy. As a winner of the Graduate Remote Instruction Innovation Fellowship in 2021 and the Berkeley Language Center Fellowship in 2022, Zhonghua designs and develops course materials that entails the incorporation of global, transcultural perspectives and DH methods into the Italian curriculum, which helps students to embrace the potential for interdisciplinary, critical and creative approaches to linguistic, literary and cultural studies.

Zhonghua holds a B.A. in Italian and M.A. in European Language and Literature. Prior to doctoral studies, Zhonghua worked as a lecturer at Shanghai International Studies University (SISU). She taught Italian language and literature courses in the School of European and Latin American Studies, and elementary Latin in Honors College.

She is a co-founder of Berkeley’s Italian Migration Studies Working Group.