From the Media to the Clinic: The Production of Desire in Urban Beijing

Dr. Everett Yuehong Zhang will lecture on urban Beijing at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey.

Everett Yuehong Zhang received his Ph.D. in social/cultural anthropology from University of California at Berkeley (2003) and did postdoctoral studies in medical anthropology at Harvard (2003-2005). Born in China, he did his undergraduate studies at Sichuan University in Chengdu and graduate studies for his first MA at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. He worked as a researcher and the executive editor of a journal in the Academy, before he came to the U.S. to pursue his Ph.D. He worked on the transformation of the Chinese society over the past several decades seen through the changes in the body, medicine and sexuality. He won the Stirling Prize from the Society for Psychological Anthropology of American Anthropological Association (2007). His book manuscript tentatively titled Impotence in China: An Illness of Chinese Modernity will be published by University of California Press. With the support of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded through the American Council of Learned Societies, he has been working on the second book project concerning the changes in governance of life and the collective structure of feelings in China through the comparison in mourning rituals and grieving between two major earthquakes over the past thirty some years and the mourning over the Graveyard for the Red Guards.