Fang He

Assistant Professor of History at Southwest University in China

Fang He is an Assistant Professor of History at Southwest University in China, specializing in transnational history with a focus on gender, Asian America, and US immigration. Her research centers on the roles of gender, sexuality, and the body to better understand U.S. inclusion, exclusion, and empire-building. She holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Before joining Southwest, she held positions at New York University, Shanghai, and Fudan University.

Her book project examines footbinding as a visual, discursive, and bureaucratic tool in U.S. immigration screenings during the Chinese Exclusion Era from trans-Pacific and global perspectives. It explores how and why this practice persisted, even as Chinese prostitution and migration declined and the cultural meanings of footbinding shifted across the Pacific. Her broader research investigates the intersections between semi-colonial China, U.S. settler colonialism, and colonization in the continental U.S. and Hawai’i. It reveals how U.S. influence in the Pacific world produced contradictory gendered and sexualized narratives and immigration inspection practices across different sites within the U.S. empire.

In another project, she investigates how bureaucratic classifications of the body intersected with the rise of modern medical science to justify immigration operations, highlighting how visual evidence—such as hair, teeth, and the size and shape of body parts—became naturalized markers of admissibility. It also uncovers the often overlooked emotional dimensions of bodily experiences, showing how the migrant body became not only a site for identity signification but also for physical coercion during everyday immigration inspections.

You can find her work here.