Amanda Zhang

Amanda Zhang is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department at Stanford University. Her research examines the transimperial circulation of animals and animal commodities across Qing and European empires in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Centering on “life” as both matter and actor in her inquiry, her project studies how animal bodies and the people who extracted, processed, and traded them became entangled, and how their interconnection generated new forms of knowledge, value, and exchange. Drawing from multilingual archives, her case studies weave together the narratives of hunters, herders, and fisherfolk from distinct ecological contexts. She shows how their transformation of living beings, through technologies that rendered life into commodities, became integrated with trade networks that crossed imperial boundaries and linked frontier economies to global markets. Through investigating these linkages, her dissertation brings into view the multidirectional forces that fueled the movement of life through imperial systems.