Sasha Su-Ling Welland (she/her/hers)

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

Contact Information

PDL B110 L
Office Hours
Autumn 2024: Mon 3-4 pm // sign up online (link below under 'Resources & Related Links')
Possibly accepting new graduate students

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
Curriculum Vitae (313.62 KB)

Sasha Welland is Chair & 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 AnthropologyFeminist Studies, positions: asia critiqueSigns: 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

Awards and Honors

New Geographies of Feminist Art, Comparative Perspectives on Chinese Culture and Society Grant, American Council for Learned Societies, 2012
Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize, Society for East Asian Anthropology, 2019
Joseph Levenson Post-1900 Book Prize (China), Association for Asian Studies, 2020
Katz Distinguished Lecturer, Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2024
Diasporic Loops (DiaL) Development Project, Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global, 2024
Building Reparative Connections and Community Health Strategies across Sites Impacted by Nuclear Weapons Development, Population Health Initiative, Tier 1 Pilot Research Grant, University of Washington, 2024

Research

Selected Research

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 RossAngelica 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-PallánMonica De La Torrealma khasawnihAngelica 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 2024

Spring 2024

Autumn 2023

Winter 2023

Additional Courses

ANTH/JSIS 442/GWSS 446: Global Asia
ANTH 469/569: Ethnographic Studio
GWSS 503: Feminist Research & Methods of Inquiry

Resources & Related Links

Affiliations

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