91ÑÇÉ«

Wednesday, 25 November 2026 | 10:00 to 11:30 ET | Virtually via Zoom

With Qing Liu, De Paul University and Adam R. Nelson, University of Wisconsion-Madison

During the early Cold War, American universities offered new opportunities to Chinese scholars whose anticipated return home had been disrupted by revolution and geopolitical conflict. Yet their incorporation into American academia involved a persistent tension: their Chinese backgrounds made them valuable sources of expertise while exposing them to political suspicion and shaping expectations about the subjects they should study.

Drawing on her book manuscript, Regulated Minds: Chinese Diasporic Academics in the Cold War American University, under contract with Cornell University Press, Qing Liu examines how Chinese scholars in the humanities and social sciences negotiated these conditions. The talk argues that ideals of academic objectivity helped legitimize their inclusion in American universities and provided grounds for asserting intellectual independence. Chinese scholars embraced and interpreted these ideals to claim that their work should be judged by its scholarly merits rather than their racial identities or presumed political loyalties.

Their experiences illuminate the tension between universities’ commitments to scholarly autonomy and practices that defined expertise through national and ethnic background. They also reveal how diasporic intellectuals sought to shape the terms of their recognition within American academic life.

Qing Liu teaches modern Chinese history and Asian American history at DePaul University. She is a historian of higher education and transnational intellectual history, and her work examines how political power and geopolitical dynamics shape the production and movement of knowledge between China and the United States. Her forthcoming book with Cornell University Press, Regulated Minds, explores how the Cold War shaped the personal and professional lives of Chinese diasporic scholars in American universities, who in turn influenced Sino-American relations. Her dissertation won the History of Education Society's Eggertsen Prize in 2024. She holds PhDs from Peking University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Adam R. Nelson received his Ph.D. in History from Brown in 1998. He was then a Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard and joined the Department of Educational Policy Studies at UW-Madison in 2001, with a courtesy affiliation in History. An historian of education, his work has examined the history of higher education from the colonial period to the present as well as the history of education policy and law. His publications include Education and Democracy: The Meaning of Alexander Meiklejohn, 1872-1964 (Wisconsin, 2001); The Elusive Ideal: Equal Educational Opportunity and the Federal Role in Boston’s Public Schools, 1950-1985 (Chicago, 2005); Exchange of Ideas: The Economy of Higher Education in Early America (Chicago, 2023); Capital of Mind: The Idea of a Modern American University (Chicago, 2024); Dartmouth College v. Woodward: Colleges, Corporations, and the Common Good (Kansas, 2025); and two co-edited volumes, Education and the Culture of Print in Modern America, with John L. Rudolph (Wisconsin, 2010); and The Global University: Past, Present, and Future Perspectives, with Ian P. Wei (Palgrave, 2012). Co-founder of the University of Wisconsin-Peking University Workshop on Higher Education, he also served as President of the History of Education Society (U.S.) and as Senior Associate Dean in the School of Education at UW-Madison.

This event is presented by the China Studies Group at the 91ÑÇÉ« Centre for Asian Research.

For more information: ycar@yorku.ca.