Yi Ren
Yi Ren
Full-time Faculty
Department: History
Programs: BA International Affairs, MA Asian Studies
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Email:
Yi Ren
801 22nd St NW, Office 330
Washington DC 20052
Yi Ren is an Assistant Professor of History at the GWU specializing in modern China. Her current research focuses on propaganda and political communication, social history, and the everyday workings of the state in twentieth-century China. She is currently completing her first book, Propaganda at the Grassroots: Cultural Labor and Socialist State-Making in Rural China, 1938-1976. At GWU, she teaches courses on modern Chinese history and world history.
Ren received her PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania. She was an An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University in 2023-24 and an ACLS Fellow in 2024-25, when she was named the Frederic E. Wakeman, Jr. Fellow in Chinese History.
Ren also serves as Director of Communication and Engagement for Chinese Historians in the United States (CHUS), where she works to promote scholarly exchange and community-building.
China’s politics and state-society interaction; rural China; history of everyday life; US-China relations
2025-2026 Collaborative Project Development Grant from the Luce/ACLS Program in China Studies
2024-2025 ACLS Fellowship, Frederic E. Wakeman, Jr. Fellow in Chinese History
2023-2024 Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, An Wang Postdoctoral Fellowship
2022-2023 Doris G. Quinn Foundation Dissertation Completion Fellowship
2021-2022 UPenn SAS Dissertation Completion Fellowship
Book manuscript in progress
Propaganda at the Grassroots: Cultural Labor and Socialist State-Making in Rural China, 1938-1976
Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania
Articles/Essays
“Pulling Strings at the Margins: Blind Storytellers and the Politics of Survival in Socialist China, 1938-1977,” Modern China (OnlineFirst, Aug 4, 2026)
“From Disillusioned Returned Youth to Party Propagandists: Rural Educated Youth and Their Involvement in Rural Clubs in Southeast Shanxi, 1961–1965,” Twentieth-Century China 47,3 (October 2022), 287–306.
“‘Relying on America’: The CPI’s Propaganda in China and Its Influence on China’s Pursuit of a New National Identity before the May Fourth Movement,” Frontiers of History in China, 14,3 (November 2019), 427-457.
“Historiography on U.S. Foreign Propaganda during WWI,” in Xu Lan edited, Modern International Relations (No. 11), World Knowledge Publisher, 2017, 167-177.
“Introduction on CPI Archive,” in Xu Lan edited, Modern International Relations (No.11), World Knowledge Publisher, 2017, 210-214.
Book Chapter
“To Be Red: Child Propagandists and Their Success in the Cultural Revolution,” in Shih-wen Sue Chen and Sin Wen Lau eds, Representations of Children and Success in Asia: Dream Chasers (London, New York: Routledge, 2023).
Book Review
Review of Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978-1985 by Jennifer Dorothy Lee (University of California Press, 2024). The Journal of Asian Studies. Accepted.
Review of The Global in the Local: A Century of War, Commerce, and Technology in China by Xin Zhang (Harvard University Press, 2023). The Journal of Chinese Military History. 14 (2025): 161-163.
Translation
The Chinese version of William H. McNeill, The Global Condition: Conquerors, Catastrophes, and Community, Princeton University Press, 1992 (Beijing University Press, 2023).