Yi Lu

Yi Lu is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at Harvard University. A historian of modern China, he is interested in the nexus of information, authority, and memory. His dissertation, “The Dustbin of History: Archival Politics in Modern China,” traces the history of official records in twentieth-century China as they were transformed from state secrets to street collectibles to scholarly resources. Blending historical, ethnographic, and digital methods, the project studies bureaucratic governance as a material practice and reflects on the praxis and ethics of history. A second project will explore epistolary exchanges and social networks in socialist China.