Two professors from SFU School for International Studies’ earn prestigious fellowship for innovative research on Chinese history and culture

The School for International Studies is proud to congratulate Assistant Professors Irene Pang and Darren Byler on being awarded the American Council of Learned Societies’ (ACLS) Early Career Fellowships within the Luce/ACLS Program in China Studies. The $50,000 fellowship supports innovative research on China, its histories, and cultures, conducted by outstanding pre-tenure scholars.

Pang and Byler are among 11 scholars in North America awarded fellowships for 2021, and notably, they are the only two scholars from Canadian institutions who have earned this award. Their award also marks the first time two scholars from the same university have been named in the same year.

Pang joined the School for International Studies in 2018 and her latest book manuscript is titled Infrastructure of Resistance: Rights Contestation among Construction Workers in Beijing and Delhi. The project examines the precarious conditions of construction workers in Beijing and Delhi. Pang compares the workers’ fight for rights, as a means of understanding infrastructural power and relationships between society and state.

Byler is new to the School for International Studies and will join the department in July 2021. His latest work, “Thinking with Violence: Narratives of Reeducation Camps & Infrastructural State Power in Northwest China”, centers upon the internment of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples by Chinese state authorities. Through interviews with former detainees and internal government documents, Byler demonstrates the roles of law, state power, and narrative in creating a space of violence

View the full list of Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Program in China Studies Early Career Fellows and read their research abstracts at the American Council of Learned Societies.