Margaret Greene, UMW History alum (’06), has won a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. Currently a third-year doctoral student in Modern Chinese History at the University of California, San Diego, she is pursuing a dissertation entitled “The Sound of Ghosts: Chuanqi, Kun Opera, and the Staging of a New China.”
Her project focuses on the elite form of kun opera, particularly its celebrated genre of supernatural tales, after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In contrast to the traditional narrative, which states that kun opera was on a steady decline from the later years of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) until the 1990s, her preliminary research has shown a flowering of kun opera in the 1950s and early 1960s – thanks in no small part to state efforts to preserve China’s illustrious artistic past (including ghosts!). Margaret’s work explores the interaction between state policy and artistic production, and how politicians, dramatists, and performers attempted to create artistic forms for a “new China” that were at once appropriately socialist and thoroughly Chinese in character.
Margaret will leave this fall for a year’s research in Shanghai, China, where she will be affiliated with East China Normal University (ECNU).
