Spring 2026 Events

Co-organizers: Jennifer Egloff & Jin Han

Program Associate: Almee Wang & Viv Wu

email: shanghai.hssc@nyu.edu

Friday, May 8, 2026

Pink Hope: A History of Breast Cancer in China and the Islamic World

by Shuang WEN

RSVP

Moderated by: Jin Han

Globally, one in eight women will develop breast cancer (BC). In China, the average diagnosis age is significantly younger, heavily impacting women establishing careers and families. This crisis is especially acute in underdeveloped, predominantly Muslim regions of western China, where under-resourced healthcare and low awareness frequently lead to late-stage presentations.

This project explores how BC has been understood, treated, and perceived within Chinese Muslim communities compared to Han-majority regions and the West. It traces the historical transition from traditional Islamic and Chinese medical practices—shaped by societal attitudes toward the female body—to the adoption of modern biomedical procedures like radical mastectomies. Despite the globalization of standardized biomedicine, many Chinese Muslim women today integrate traditional treatments. Rather than rejecting science, they use traditional medicine as an adjuvant therapy to manage biomedical toxicity and reclaim bodily agency. By centering the experiences of marginalized women in western China, this project addresses a critical gap in the global history of medicine and contemporary public health literature. Beyond generating a vital and real-time historical record, this project is deeply committed to improving contemporary public health policy and inclusive healthcare delivery.

Bio

Shuang WEN is a historian of modern China and the Arab world. Prior to joining NYU Shanghai, Prof. Wen held fellowships at the National University of Singapore and New York University Abu Dhabi. As a native Mandarin speaker, she received intensive Arabic-language training from Cairo and Damascus. Shuang specializes in the multilayered interactions and exchanges between China and the Middle East, which comprises agricultural, diplomatic, intellectual, labor, medicinal, and religious affairs. In this HSS presentation, she is going to discuss her second-book project.

Thursday, March 19, 2026

China’s Geopolitics by Other Means: Douyin and DeepSeek

by Davide Giacomo Zoppolato

RSVP

Moderated by: Jennifer Egloff

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rapidly shifted the way that societies view work and productivity. Often touted for its productivity gains in the workplace, AI also raises questions relating to geopolitics. Large Language Models (LLMs) - a widely used manifestation of AI by people across all segments of society – takes on agency in shaping how the world is imagined, categorized, and contested. We argue that understanding geopolitical discourse through LLMs is illustrative of current political tensions between the world’s two largest geopolitical actors - the United States and China and is illustrative of a new form of global political phenomenon - ‘agentic geopolitics’ where computational systems assume an active role in shaping spatial imaginaries and political hierarchies. This paper analyzes and compares US and Chinese views on key geopolitical topics shaping contemporary US-China relations from the vantage points of two widely used LLMs - one American (ChatGPT) and one Chinese (DeepSeek) in order to understand how AI is generating distinctive discourses and understandings that are shaping distinctive ‘truths’ about how geopolitics is practiced today. Our analysis sheds light on the fault lines that comprise one of the world’s most important political relationships and serves as a contemporary reminder of how country-linked AI tools have the potential to exacerbate political tensions and divisions in ways that human driven diplomatic actions do not.

Bio

Davide Giacomo Zoppolato is a Fellow in Global China at New York University Shanghai. His research investigates China’s global engagements through the lenses of critical geopolitics, political economy, and computational social science. He examines how infrastructure, development finance, and media narratives shape geopolitical dynamics across the Global South. Zoppolato holds a PhD in Geography from West Virginia University, where his research focused on China–Pakistan geopolitics and included nine months of fieldworkalong the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor. He also holds a combined Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Law (JD equivalent) from the University of Turin. His work integrates large-scale datasets, natural language processing, geospatial analysis, and fieldwork to analyze China’s presence abroad. His publications appear in journals such as Geopolitics, Eurasian Geography and Economics, and the Asian Journal of Law and Society. Alongside his academic research, he consults for international organizations and develops digital platforms and data infrastructures to map development projects and analyze global infrastructure networks. I will also present both the draft article and a previous work recently published in Geopolitics.