Kelly Fu

A native of Xiamen, China, Kelly Fu is a PhD candidate in early modern global history at Stanford University. Kelly’s work focuses on the mobile China Trade objects, as well as the materials, knowledges, and people that these lovely things set in motion across China, Britain, and the Americas during the long eighteenth century. Thinking about the processes of “making in China” as well as the objects that were “made in China,” Kelly engages the material as well as the textual archive to reframe Chinese history with a global context and to complicate longstanding narratives about European Enlightenment and empire-building. Using material culture and through collaboration with museums, she hopes to tell more inclusive stories about global empires.