
Contact Information
Biography
Sasha Welland is Professor of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, Adjunct 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.
Awards and Honors
Research
Selected Research
- Sasha Su-Ling Welland. 2024. “Haikuology, for Kara, after Sonia Sanchez.” Anthropology and Humanism, http://doi.org/10.1111/anhu.12512. Download PDF
- Sarah Choi. "Cross-Generational Storytelling: A Conversation with Sasha Su-Ling Welland and Sabrina Craig." Feminist Media Histories 9.4 (2023): 135-150. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.4.135. Download PDF
- Sasha Su-Ling Welland. “Die Frage des Feminismus in der Zetgenössischen Chinesischen Kunst” (The Question of Feminism in Chinese Contemporary Art), Empowerment: Art and Feminisms, edited by Andreas Beitin, Katharina Koch, and Uta Ruhkamp, 206-215. Wolfsburg: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2022. Download PDF
- Roundtable Discussion, "Let's Talk Facts! Globale Expert*innen zu Feminismen in Kunst und Gesellschaft" (Global Experts on Feminisms in Art and Society), Empowerment: Art and Feminisms, edited by Andreas Beitin, Katharina Koch, and Uta Ruhkamp, 112-121. Wolfsburg: Wolfsburg Kunstmuseum, 2022. Download PDF
- Christina Yuen Zi Chung and Sasha Su-Ling Welland, "Wandering Geographies: Aesthetic Practice along China's Belt and Road Initiative," Feminist Studies 47.2 (2021): 372-417.
- Sasha Su-Ling Welland. “List as Form: Literary, Ethnographic, Long, Short, Heavy, Light.” In Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment, edited by Carole McGranahan, 28-33. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.
- Sasha Su-Ling Welland. "Camouflaged Histories: Lei Yan as Chinese Guerrilla Girl." positions: asia critique 28.1 (2020): 87-119.
- National Women's Studies Association, Annual Conference, 2019.
- The Crescent Moon Symposium, University of California, Los Angeles, May 4, 2018.
- Sasha Su-Ling Welland. "Open Book." Viewpoint series exhibit of Elizabeth Murray and Anne Waldman: Her Story. Seattle: Henry Art Gallery, 2018.
- Sasha Welland. "Aesthetics." Cultural Anthropology, Theorizing the Contemporary Series, Keywords for Ethnography and Design, 2018.
- Sasha Su-Ling Welland. Experimental Beijing: Gender and Globalization in Chinese Contemporary Art. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Download PDF
- Sasha Su-Ling Welland. “World of the Visual: Introduction to Visual Arts Section.” In Creating Across Cultures: Women in the Arts from China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, ed. Michelle Vosper, 69. Hong Kong: East Slope Publishing, 2017. Download PDF
- Ethnography Unbound: Experiments in New Scholarship, Sasha Su-Ling Welland, Ph.D., 2016
- Sasha Su-Ling Welland, “List as Form: Literary, Ethnographic, Long, Short, Heavy, Light,” Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology, September 28, http://savageminds.org.
- Sasha Su-Ling Welland. “Opening the Great Wall” [开放⻓长城], Chinese text translated by Mao Weidong, in Pain in Soul: Performance Art and Video Works by He Chengyao [⼼灵之痛:何成瑶的⾏行为艺术及影像]. Shanghai: Zendai Museum of Modern Art, 2007, 50-66.
- Sasha Su-Ling Welland. “Ocean Paradise.”Journal of Visual Culture 6.3 (2007): 419-435.
- Sasha Su-Ling Welland. A Thousand Miles of Dreams: The Journeys of Two Chinese Sisters. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.
- Sasha Su-Ling Welland. “What Women Will Have Been: Reassessing Feminist Cultural Production in China,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31.4 (2006): 941-66.
- Sasha Su-Ling Welland. “On Curating Cruel/Loving Bodies,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 4.1 (2005): 17‐36.
- Sasha Su-Ling Welland. Cruel/LovingBodies [酷/爱⾝身体], bilingual Chinese/English exhibit catalogue, editor and translator, Beijing: 798 Space & Shanghai: Duolun Museum of Modern Art, 2004.
Research Advised
- Chung, Christina Yuen Zi. (2024). Ph.D. Dissertation: At the Seams of the World: Gender and Decoloniality in Hong Kong Contemporary Art.
- Wang, S. Y. (2022). Cruel activism : precarity, labor, and affect of Chinese feminist and LGBT rights NGOs. University of Washington Libraries.
- Tian, Y. (2019). Trapped in Time: Bodily Experiences of Family Dependent Workers (jiashu) in Daqing, a Model Industrial City in High-Socialist China. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.
- Byler, D. T. (2018). Spirit Breaking: Uyghur Dispossession, Culture Work and Terror Capitalism in a Chinese Global City. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.
- khasawnih, alma. (2018). Embodied Writing: Gender and Class in the Graffiti and Murals of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.
- Zhou, S. (2017). The Gendered Landscape of Chinese Forestry Reform: Labor, Narrative and Resistance, 1950s-Current. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.
- 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).
Courses Taught
Autumn 2025
Spring 2025
Autumn 2024
Spring 2024
Autumn 2023
Winter 2023
ANTH/JSIS 442/GWSS 446: Global Asia
ANTH 469/569: Ethnographic Studio
GWSS 503: Feminist Research & Methods of Inquiry