Richard Yu-Cheng Shih

Richard Yu-Cheng Shih (施昱丞) is an environmental historian from Taiwan whose research investigates the history of human interactions with the riverine ecology in modern China after 1800, specifically the Yangzi Delta. His dissertation explores the making of minoritized groups in rural and peri-urban China from the perspective of inland water peripheries. Drawing on archival findings across Taiwan, Japan, China, the U.S., the U.K., and France as well as the extensive fieldwork in China between 2020 and 2023, his project discerns the politics within the riparian management in which modern state regimes reformed and marginalized riverine lives—both human and nonhuman included—under the national champaign for security and progress. His ethnography, emphasizing the boat-dwelling migrants, unveils the historical contingency of floods, diseases, and salinization in turning littoral spaces into enclaves of cultural and religious minorities. He has a journal article forthcoming in Environment History, analyzing the modern outbreak of the parasitic epidemic in the lower Yangzi basin. Richard received his Ph. D. in History at Brown University, with an inter-disciplinary training of anthropology and digital GIS mapping. His work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (CCKF), and the Esherick-Ye Family Foundation (EYFF).