Sasha Su-Ling Welland | Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies

Chair & Professor, Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies; Adjunct Professor, Anthropology

Contact Information

swelland@uw.edu

(206) 221-4725

PDL B110 L

Office Hours:

By appointment

Possibly accepting new graduate students

Fields of Interest

Art Asian American Chinese Ecocriticism Ethnography Public Scholarship Socialism and Post-Socialism Transnational Visual Culture Women of Color

Biography

PhD, Anthropology (designated emphasis in Feminist Studies), University of California Santa Cruz, 2006

MA, Anthropology, University of California Santa Cruz, 1998

BA, Individually Designed Major (Ethnic Studies), Stanford University, 1991

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Sasha Welland is Associate Professor of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology, and China Studies faculty member. Her first book, A Thousand Miles of Dreams: The Journeys of Two Chinese Sisters (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), traces the social history and border-crossing lives of two “modern girls,” a writer and a doctor, who emerged from China’s early twentieth-century women’s movement. Experimental Beijing: Gender and Globalization in Chinese Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, 2018) is an ethnography of Chinese contemporary art as a zone of cultural encounter, in which post-socialist revaluations of rural and urban space, public and private boundaries, and masculinity and femininity are represented and questioned. Her current research on embodied ecologies, rooted in her hometown of St. Louis, examines the entanglement of military and medicine, nuclear colonialism and racial capitalism in the Anthropocene production of everyday carcinogenic relations. An editorial board member of Journal of Visual Culture, Welland has published in Cultural Anthropology, Feminist Studies, positions: asia critique, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. She has curated feminist art exhibits in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.

Awards

2019 Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize awarded by the Society for East Asian Anthropology to Experimental Beijing.
2020 Joseph Levenson Post-1900 Book Prize (China) awarded by the Association for Asian Studies to Experimental Beijing.

Featured Media

UBC Itineraries of Exchange Symposium, 2010

Research

Selected Research

Research Advised: Graduate Masters Theses

Tian, Yiyu (2019). Trapped in Time: Bodily Experiences of Family Dependent Workers (jiashu) in Daqing, a Model Industrial City in High-socialist China (Master's thesis, University of Washington). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global database. (UMI No. 13897929)

Research Advised: Graduate Dissertations

Research Advised: Publications Books

Vosper, Michelle, ed. Creating Across Cultures: Women in the Arts from China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. East Slope Publishing Ltd. (Muse, Hong Kong), 2017.

Conversations

Sasha Welland is in dialogue with:

Michelle Habell-Pallán's humanistic and cultural studies work on race, gender, and sexuality through expressive culture. While Michelle focuses on music and Sasha on visual art, they share together with Monica De La Torre and alma khasawnih an interest in how cultural production shapes social categories and is deeply enmeshed in social, political, and economic relations and struggles, in North America, China, and the Arab World.

Luana Ross, Angelica Macklin, and Nicole Robert around the use of visual methods, be those documentary film or museum curation, as part of feminist research and activism.

Michelle Habell-Pallán, Monica De La Torre, alma khasawnih, Angelica Macklin, Nicole Robert, and Shuxuan Zhou about feminist approaches to the digital humanities in research, pedagogy, and as a way of connecting collaborative scholarship with new public audiences.

Priti Ramamurthy, Chandan Reddy, and Amanda Swarr on questions related to transnational feminist theory and activism such as: How can we connect the scholarship and activism of feminists working in various contexts to ask new questions about the transnational discourses of survival and rights—often posited as the contemporary modes that have replaced the twentieth-century one of revolution? What are the methodological and epistemological contributions and contradictions of feminist activists and theorists where they come together in praxis?

Shuxuan Zhou, Yiyu Tian, Christina Yuen Zi Chung, and Stephanie Yingyi Wang about feminist theory, histories of gender and sexuality, and cross-generational dialogues in Greater China (Mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan).