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It may sound cliché, Yanshuo Zhang says, but what she admires about 91����—and all liberal arts colleges—is the freedom it gives professors to incorporate their research into their lessons.

A course Zhang developed last year, Imagining China from the Borders: Crossing the Racial, Ethnic and Cultural Borderlines in Asia, demonstrates how beneficial such practicality is for students.

On top of assigning readings and writing, Zhang brought to class artifacts and field photos she started collecting as a teenager living in Chengdu, China, and later, as a graduate student conducting field research in the ethnic minority regions of her home country.

“Students went from reading from digital sources and paperback books to seeing and touching something firsthand,” says Zhang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures. “That was a moment of enlightenment, both for myself and for my students. Seeing the interactions that students had with those materials was absolutely moving and is what fuels me in the classroom.”

In September, Zhang and a team of collaborators she is leading received a $150,000 grant from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) to support the development of strategies to bolster and diversify the field of China Studies at North American colleges and universities.

Zhang's project, “Diversifying Humanistic Pedagogy in China Studies: Incorporating Ethnic Minority Literary and Cultural Productions into North American College Classrooms,” was the singular national winner of the inaugural Luce/ACLS Collaborative Grant in China Studies.

Formed in 1919, ACLS is a nonprofit federation of 81 scholarly organizations and a preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences.

In , Deena Ragavan, ACLS director of international programs, lauded Zhang’s groundbreaking project for its commitment to making resources and knowledge freely available to teachers and students across the country.

Zhang, now in her second academic year at 91����, called her ACLS project the crowning moment of her years of interdisciplinary scholarly practice, spanning fields as diverse as literature, anthropology and the visual arts.

“As a scholar and an educator who’s passionate about advocating ethnic diversity both in the classroom and in the scholarly community,” she says, “my goal is to facilitate bigger changes in the field of China Studies beyond the institutional level, beyond a particular college and beyond a particular department.”

As the principal investigator of the winning project, Zhang plans to build open-access digital sources that will benefit educators, students and the public by making knowledge about China’s diverse shaoshu minuzu—ethnic minorities—available to anyone worldwide.

The interdisciplinary project “is an innovative way to connect scholarship with public interests by promoting diversity in teaching and research,” she says.

Zhang grew fascinated with China’s ethnic minorities as a child, when her father, an artist and educator, brought her along on trips to Sichuan’s forgotten villages.

“As a teenager,” she says, “I was deeply struck by the amazing ethnic costumes, cultural traditions and the architectural wonders of those regions. The diversity of Chinese culture is a hidden treasure that many people in the West don’t know about.”

While a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford, Zhang penned her dissertation on the Qiang people—an ethnic group with ties to ancient China and a host of sacred traditions. Zhang has since written a book based on her dissertation that she hopes to publish next year. She also plans to make a documentary on the Qiang people, a passion project that aligns with her vision for her ACLS project.

During the tenure of the grant, Zhang will collaborate with professors from top U.S. universities, as well as the founder of Sichuan’s Taoping Qiang Culture Museum, and her father, Jingui Zhang, whose artistic portrayals of China’s ethnic minority landscapes and architectural heritage have appeared in art exhibits at major U.S. universities.

Together, they intend to develop three methods to make Chinese Studies an integral part of global studies on race, ethnicity and identity.

First, the team plans to develop an open-access, interactive website featuring works of literature in their original text and English translation. “These works are not only literary masterpieces,” Zhang says, “but they are also ethnographic accounts of the religious landscape, of people’s daily life and many other aspects to learn about minority cultures.”

Second, Zhang hopes to build a digital reservoir or depository for collected artifacts and artworks where professors and students can learn a piece’s history and importance to a community. The collective aims to set up exhibits and collaborate with museums in California and beyond “to foster better transnational or international understandings of different indigenous cultures and different international communities,” Zhang says.

Lastly, the project proposes crowdsourcing and creating a comprehensive collection of syllabi for educators interested in teaching about China’s ethnic cultures at the college or K-12 level.

“My goal is not to convince everyone that they have to teach a single course on minority cultures,” Zhang says, “but that minority cultures can be easily incorporated into any course about China, Asia or indigenous cultures. You could take one reading, one video, one object or a bunch of them. We just hope teachers will be conscious about the process of encouraging more diversity in the classroom.”

The diversity of Chinese culture is a hidden treasure that many people in the West don’t know about.

— Yanshuo Zhang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures

According to Zhang, China’s vast and rich ethnic minority groups present important pedagogical engagement opportunities for American educators and students.

While China and the U.S. are multiethnic, multicultural countries with complex senses of identity, Zhang says, many of China’s ethnic minority groups are traditionally not taught in American college classrooms—a contributing factor to the image of China as a homogenous country.

Through her ACLS grant and her pedagogical endeavors, Zhang hopes to transform the ways China is taught and understood at the university level. She also hopes to build future bridges to connect China Studies with other fields of scholarly and social inquiry, such as Native American Studies and Global Indigenous Studies.

“By doing that,” she says, “I hope students can take a deeper appreciation of ethnicity and diversity with them into other aspects of their academic and professional pursuits. We want them to see China—and our materials—as this sort of experimental lab where they can piece together information and think about diversity from both personal and global perspectives.”