Peng Hai is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches a graduate seminar on China’s Inner Asian regions. He earned his PhD from Harvard in 2023. Dr. Peng studies three emergent fields: the modern history of the Chinese ethnic borderlands, Islam in China, and the cultural critique of ethnic domination in post-colonial states.
Dr. Peng’s current research pivots to a global lens in understanding the curtailed self-expression of certain ethnically marked bodies in increasingly majoritarian, post-colonial national states. He strives to understand the structural enablers that once facilitated the globe-trotting experience of some members of those minorities, who once were the key agents in the embodied practice of connecting the globe as they sought religious affinity, modernist reform, and identity renewal.