East Asian Studies MA students receive 2025–26 Dean's Research Award
Two East Asian Studies MA students, Daniel Zhang and Anqi Zheng, have received the 2025–26 Dean’s Research Award for Master’s Students. This award provides funding to support research relevant to a master’s student’s degree completion or research or conference travel.
About Daniel's project:
Daniel’s research centers on gender and sexuality, particularly the lives and representations of sexual minorities. His Master’s thesis focuses on a group often overlooked within contemporary Chinese gay discourses: wanghuang. In the Chinese queer context, this term refers to gay men who draw upon their erotic charisma by publicly sharing amateur pornographic pictures or videos of themselves on social media platforms, most notably X (formerly known as Twitter). Rather than treating wanghuang as mere spectacle, his thesis seeks to map out their digital ecology and to illuminate the lived realities of this stigmatized community.
Daniel has also been developing a sociolinguistic project that examines the linguistic strategies adopted by Japanese gay men on dating apps. Drawing on a corpus of self-introductions collected from a Japanese gay men’s dating platform, he analyzes how factors such as age, region, sexual position, and type of relationship sought influence users’ speech style choices. He will present this ongoing study at the Duke–Ochanomizu Student Workshop at Ochanomizu University in Tokyo and was invited to deliver an oral presentation of this project at the 2026 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America.
About Anqi's project:
Anqi plans to use the award to support her travel to the National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, D.C. to advance her master’s thesis, which examines women and collecting culture in Republican China. The National Museum of Asian Art houses important archival materials, including the Ferguson Family Papers and the Charles Lang Freer Papers. The former contains correspondence to and from one of the most influential dealers of Chinese art in the 20th century, while the latter documents the activities of a major collector of Chinese art during the same period. These papers shed light on the processes of global art acquisition and exchange, often revealing moments of disagreement and negotiation between dealers and family members. In some well-known cases, such as the sale of the Bronze Altar Set—now part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection—women’s decisions and attitudes played vital roles. Yet their contributions have received little attention in existing scholarship on antiquarianism and collecting culture. Anqi’s project seeks to address this gap.