Shining Wang

Welcome! I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Virginia. I am a cultural sociologist studying how cultural forms that persist or reemerge across political ruptures shape contemporary national life. My research examines how objects, discourses, and practices carry traces of earlier political orders into new settings, where they can enable, constrain, and redirect how people negotiate the past and enact possible collective futures. My current work focuses on contemporary China.

My dissertation, “Reconstructing Chineseness: National Imaginaries and the Reworking of Historical Cultural Forms in China’s Hanfu Movement,” examines how historical cultural forms are reconstructed in contemporary China through the Hanfu Movement, a grassroots cultural revival. Focusing on imperial discourse (tianxia), Hanfu, and Confucian ritual, I study how traditions whose original social foundations have been transformed are reactivated and made consequential in contemporary national life.

My peer-reviewed article, “Object Grammar: Interpretive Divergences and Redirection around a National Object in Contemporary China’s Hanfu Movement,” is forthcoming in Theory and Social Inquiry, the new journal founded by the former editorial board of Theory and Society.

Prior to my Ph.D. studies, I received my B.A. in Sociology, with a minor in Chinese language and literature, from Fudan University in 2021.

My CV is available here. You can also find my ORCID record here.