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SHI Yu is Assistant Professor of History at the Centre for China Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of late imperial and modern China, with a particular interest in the historical intersections of technology and the arts. Moving between the microhistory of lived experience and the macro-level politics of culture, she explores how people negotiated their cultural practices within broader social, political, and technological transformations.

She is currently completing her first book, Performing in the Margins, which offers a technological and labor history of the institutionalization and marginalization of traditional folk performance across multiple media in modern China. Drawing on overlooked gramophone recordings and film artifacts, this project explores the survival of folk performance—through negotiation, rupture, and reinvention—amid technological modernity, colonial capitalism, and socialist governance from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s.

Beyond cultural history, her research and teaching interests include media history, gender and sexuality in modern China, and material culture. She is also interested in the preservation and historical interpretation of media archives.

Research Interests:

• Cultural History of Late Imperial and Modern China 
• Global History of Media 
• Technology and the Arts 
• History of Gender and Sexuality 
• Material Cultures