Shanni Zhao

China Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow

Biography

Shanni Zhao is an social and cultural anthropologist. She received her Ph.D. from Anthropology Department at Harvard University with a secondary field in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her research interests focus on urban governance, state-making, affect and sentiments, public and mediation, marriage and social reproduction, in both contemporary and 20-Century China.

Research

Shanni Zhao’s book project takes state-sponsored matchmaking as a vantage point to study the formation of affective publics in China’s metropolises, and, thereby, the relations between marriage-making and state-making, and between power and attraction.

Publications

“Transgenerational Transmission of Suffering: State Violence, Memory, and Aspiration for Alternative Intimate Lives in Contemporary China.” Ethos: the Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology (Berkeley, Calif.), 2023.