Tina Chen is an associate professor of history and the co-coordinator of the interdisciplinary research circle on globalization and cosmopolitanism. She is a specialist in modern Chinese history, with a specific research interest in the social, political, and cultural norms that structure people’s engagement with society, nation-states, and international organizations and movements.

On October 31, 2011, Dr. Chen spoke on Emotional Struggles: Museum-Making in Socialist and Post-Socialist China.

Dr. Chen has published articles examining visual culture (including film, public exhibits, and news media) as a site of production of national subjectivity and geopolitical relations.

Her research addresses how rights of people have been part of socialist and post-socialist struggles in China, and the promises and limitations of particular rights frameworks and alliances across the 20th century. She is internationally recognized for her work on gender and women’s emancipation in Maoist China; Sino-Soviet cultural exchange and its relationship to global anti-colonial struggles; and historical cultural studies committed to interrogating how inequalities are produced, reinforced, and challenged through the global circulation of cultural products.

Dr. Chen's work also includes research on Chinese wartime migration between Burma, China, and India in the 1930s and 1940s. Recent articles include Peasant and Woman in Maoist Revolutionary Theory, 1920s-1950s (2011), and a forthcoming article in positions: asia critique entitled Asian Boundaries, Documentary Regimes, and the Political Economy of the Personal.

Dr. Chen’s teaching emphasizes critical engagement with alternative conceptualization of rights, the everyday manifestations of rights struggles, and the benefits and costs of programs initiated by nation-states and international organizations that seek to address particular forms of oppression and inequality over others. She teaches courses in the fields of Modern World History; Culture, Rights, and International Relations in Post-1939 World History; History of Modern China; and Chinese Revolutionary Theory.