Jia-Chen Fu is an Associate Professor of Chinese at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, specializing in the history of science, technology, and medicine in modern China. She is the author of The Other Milk: Reinventing Soy in Republican China (University of Washington, 2018) and is on the editorial board for Re:Past – Studies in the History of Nutrition series with Johns Hopkins University Press. In addition to this modern Chinese foodways project, her other research interest at present involves wartime Chinese psychology. She’s a steadfast devotee of kimchi jjigae made with doubanjiang.
Michelle T. King is an Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, specializing in modern Chinese gender and food history. She is the editor of Culinary Nationalism in Asia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and a special issue on Chinese culinary regionalism in Global Food History (Summer 2020). Her latest research project focuses on the career of Taiwan’s noted cookbook author and television celebrity, Fu Pei-mei (1931-2004). She had the best bowl of noodles in her life twenty-five years ago at a nameless farmstead in rural Hunan province and has been seeking its equal ever since.
Jakob Klein is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Department of Anthropology at SOAS University of London and Chair of the SOAS Food Studies Centre. His research has explored regional cuisines, local foods, and food ethics in the People’s Republic of China. Klein is the co-editor of The Handbook of Food and Anthropology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Ethical Eating in the Postsocialist and Socialist World (University of California Press, 2014), and “Consumer and Consumed: Humans and Animals in Globalising Food Systems” (special issue of Ethnos, 2017). As a child, his aunts and uncles described him as “a serious eater.” He still is.
Mukta completed her PhD in 2018 with research based in Guangzhou, Macau and Hong Kong which examined the dynamics of South Asian food and identity in the shifting landscape of majoritarian Cantonese culinary cultures. As well as archival research, her methods were based on extensive interviews, She enjoys the interview process and its production side and has nurtured these skills over several years in research projects capturing the life histories of UK cheese makers, as well as producing and soon hosting food-research related podcasts series for the SOAS Food Studies Centre. She’s obsessed with perfecting her claypot rice and finding the best spot in the house to dry her home-made lap cheong – somewhere that her dog can’t reach.
Chenjia Xu is an anthropologist whose research expertise lies in anthropology of food and sensory studies. Her previous research projects examine how people navigate the power-infused social fields in contemporary China through the everyday practices of food and eating, paying special attention to the sensorial dimensions of these practices and processes. Her doctoral thesis provides a sensory ethnography of ‘foodism’ in Beijing, explicating how young middle-class urbanites engage with textual, mediated, bodily and social foodie practices to address their predicaments under urbanization, stratification and individualization in contemporary China. She is currently developing a research project on food waste practices which seeks to explore how food becomes waste at the intersection of food cultures, ideologies and politics, the contingency of everyday life and the agentive materiality of food itself. As a self-claimed jiaozi master from South China, Chenjia once made 100+ jiaozi from scratch on her own.
Xiaowei Wu is an interdisciplinary artist working in time-based media and painting. They also freelance as a graphic designer, illustrator, and videographer (design portfolio). Their new favorite device is the soymilk machine, with which one can make more than just soy milk.
Cynthia is an undergraduate student at Emory. She has been an avid cook and food lover starting at the age of 12. In her spare time, she also helps run a FB Asian food community of over 300k called “subtle asian cooking.” Through food and especially Chinese food, she explores her own identity of being Chinese. She likes the jianbingguozi without guozi.