Yutong Li is a historian specializing in East Asian art and visual culture from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, with an emphasis on transregional and global exchange. She received her Ph.D. in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University in 2024. Following a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at NYU Shanghai’s Center for Global Asia, she joined the American University of Paris as an Assistant Professor of Art History.
Li’s research reconsiders the early modern Chinese conceptualization of ethnicity and gender through imagery materials. Her current book project, “The Aesthetics of Alterity: Imaging Foreignness in and Beyond Early Modern China”, examines how depictions of foreign tribute bearers—once confined to courtly rituals and imperial agendas—entered the commercial art and print markets of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China and beyond. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that draws from art history, literature, critical theory, and intellectual history, her research demonstrates that these images reconfigured the Sino-Foreign distinction from an imperial model of ethnocultural hierarchy into a more dynamic site of negotiation between foreignness and marginality, spectator and spectacle, gender and ethnicity, and center and periphery.
Education/Degrees
Ph.D., Princeton University
MA, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London
BA, University of Virginia
News
“Distant Bodies: Depicting Europeans in Early Modern China.” Co-authored with He Bian. In Early Modern Bodies, ed. Sarah Toulalan, 277–298. London and New York: Routledge, 2026.
“Dharma in Landscape: Chen Chao’s Scroll of Fifty-Three Arhats.” In Momentous Mountains and Wonderous Rivers: The Artistic, Philosophical and Cultural Engagement with Chinese Landscape Painting (forthcoming).
“Visualizing an Emotional Realm: Dreamscape in Chinese Romance Opera.” Mingdai yanjiu 明代研究 [Journal of Ming Studies] 39 (December 2022): 101–152.
“The Agency of Assemblage: On a Jade Gui-bi from the Freer Collection.” Meicheng Zaijiu 美成在久 [Orientations] (2019.6): 78–85.
