Yunning Zhang’s monograph-in-progress, “Bodies for Devotion: Race, Religion, and the Early Modern Transpacific,” is the first book-length study to theorize early modern Asian racialization through the intersection of missionary expansion in maritime Asia and the circulation of Asian bodies across transoceanic slavery and migration. Drawing on multilingual archives from Macao, the Philippines, and Mexico—including hagiographies, mystical treatises, missionary correspondence, religious theater, and decorative arts—it examines representations of Japanese, Chinese, Mughal, and Indigenous Filipino subjects to reconstruct the relational making of Asian difference across the early modern transpacific. She is also working on a second project tracing how systems of indentured labor in the nineteenth-century Pacific world produced an ambiguous Chinese legal personhood that sustained racial capitalism.

Yunning Zhang is the Arnaldo Momigliano Postdoctoral Scholar at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. She is a scholar of colonial Latin America and Iberian Asia specializing in the transpacific formation of racial knowledge across literary, religious, legal, and visual archives. More broadly, her teaching and scholarship advance transnational and transtemporal approaches to Asian racialization by foregrounding the intimacies between the often-separated histories of slavery and indentured labor across multiple imperial formations in the Americas. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Colonial Latin American Review, postmedieval, GLQ, ASAP/Review, Romance Notes, and Symposium.