Shoufu Yin PhD

Shoufu Yin is an assistant professor of history at the University of British Columbia. His expertise lies in the intellectual and political cultures of China and Inner Asia from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries. Delving into sources in Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, Persian, and various European languages, he endeavors to show how previously unknown and marginalized thinkers had contributed to important themes in theory and philosophy. His first book manuscript, The China That Could Have Been: Sinitic Rhetoric and the Search for a Better World, 1100–1600 (currently under review), contends that the everyday political imagination of countless individuals lays the foundation of modern political thought. His next book, titled 1156: China’s Referendum, will trace how emic concepts and indigenous experiences from China can help us reframe and rewrite the global history of democratization. He has also been conducting research for another major project that rethinks global intellectual transformations through the lens of Manchu- and Mongolian-language historiographies of the seventeenth century. His recent articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Journal of the History of Ideas, History of Political Thought, Journal of Asian Studies, T’oung Pao, Journal of Chinese History, Korean Studies, and other platforms. 

Short statement: Shoufu Yin is committed to exploring new histories of liberty and democracy from a global standpoint. His article, “The Global Network of Liberty” (APSR, forthcoming) contends that liberty was already a globally connected concept during the late Middle Ages. Developing a network approach to concepts and applying it to primary sources in ten languages across Afro-Eurasia, he maps how thinkers from different parts of the world contributed to the formation of the network. As such, the concept(s) of liberty, instead of being a product of the West, is more accurately seen as a result of interactions among different parts of the world. With Simon (Sihang) Luo (Stanford), Shoufu has also been contributing to another large collaborative project: “1980, the Global Electoral Moment: China and Beyond.” The project excavates the concrete, embodied, gendered, and materialized experiences of voting at critical moments saturated with uncertainties and excitement, sound and fury, hope and loss, nostalgia and bewilderment. It will result in a series of exhibitions, databases, and scholarly articles.