Siyen Fei, originally from Taiwan, received her PhD from Stanford University in 2004 and is currently a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. Focusing on the political and cultural activism of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Ming dynasty China (1368-1644), her work explores the interplay of social structure and individual agency. Fei examines a range of historical actors—women, urbanites, and border residents—and offers a new paradigm of “defiant late-Ming energy” that re-visions a society formerly considered submissive to an all-powerful imperium. Surveying the topics of gender, urbanization, and empire, she explores how this state-society dynamic drove unprecedented transformations: a patriarchal system subverted by court-promoted control of female sexuality; an idealized rural empire facing surges of urbanization; a self-proclaimed Han-native Chinese polity destabilized by migration and resultant de-Sinicization. In her book Negotiating Urban Space: Nanjing and Late Ming Urbanization (Harvard, 2010), Fei portrays urbanism in late imperial China as defined by the distinct vision of each dynastic empire, showing how Nanjing residents reinvented the place of cities by appropriating institutional and cultural resources designed for rural communities.
At the Academy, Fei looked at the notion of identity in China as she finished her book project, “Sexuality and Empire: Female Chastity and Frontier Societies in Ming China (1368-1644).” Since imperial times, state rhetoric has reiterated the power of Chinese civilization in sustaining a homogeneous “China.” Scholars, on the other hand, have endeavored to uncover non-Han minorities’ perception of, resistance to, and even subversive appropriation of state Sinicizing practices. Drawing upon anthropological fieldwork, the book’s investigation of late-Ming borderlands reveals the gaps in the Sinicization narrative. In the empire’s northwest and southeast borders, hundreds of thousands of Ming Chinese left the Middle Kingdom—either by their own volition or under compulsion—and became de-Sinicized. “Sexuality and Empire” looks at these borderlands people, caught in the making and unmaking of the Ming Empire, and examines how they confronted their plight on their own terms. At a time when familiar vocabularies such as empire/identity were unavailable, the commemoration of chaste heroines—women who martyred themselves to preserve their chastity—became a venue to negotiate destabilized frontier identities and to re-imagine the Chinese world.
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