Jielu Xu is a second-year PhD student in the Department of History at UBC. She is primarily interested in exploring history from oceanic and island perspectives, with a particular focus on the easily overlooked island societies and experiences in early modern China. Her doctoral project seeks to uncover a multi-scale history of Zhoushan, China’s largest archipelago, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, examining how the Ming-Qing state, neighbouring East Asian entities, the British Empire, and local communities perceived and shaped this archipelagic world.

Dr. Jessica Hanser & Dr. Leo Shin