Dr. Qin Fang

Dr. Qin Fang teaches East Asian history at McDaniel College. During the past five years, Dr. Fang has researched the origination, dissemination, and development of a Chinese folk art—tiehua (wrought iron pictures) in and beyond China. Funded by an ASIANetwork student-faculty research grant, she led two groups of McDaniel students researching the history of the folk art in Wuhu, China (2011 and 2015). In the summer of 2016, Dr. Fang collaborated with Kyle Parks, Cathryn Smith, and Jean-Claude Noar, as well as  on a research project entitled Digital Tiehua. Our objectives are three folds:

• To explore social, cultural, and political transformation of tiehua in its historical contexts
• To share our knowledge of tiehua with both general public and academic.
• To engage audience with digital tools such as online gallery, online catalogue, blog entries, etc.

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Kyle Parks

Kyle  history major at McDaniel College, with a minors in new media journalism and Spanish. Kyle has centered his studies on Russia, central Asia, and China. He enjoys approaching history from a sociocultural perspective—the individual experiences and cultural implications of each region .

Within his new media journalism minor, he spends a fair amount of time studying visual rhetoric and  semiotics. He has focused heavily on learning the methods and rhetorical backbone of publishing his work digitally as part of the ever-increasing multimodality of contemporary scholarship (and journalism), even maintaining his own website.

He is focusing on tiehua as a means of social resistance. While there are many ways to look at this artistic style, it becomes clear that all throughout its history, tiehua has been used to resist the status quo in society, even in its origin.

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Cathryn Smith 

Cathryn is a history major at McDaniel College wit a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies, and a specialization in Women’s History. She has centered a majority of her works around Women’s history in North America, China, and Western Europe, and enjoys taking an inter-sectional and inter-cultural approach to the understanding of both of her fields.

She focuses primarily on the visual representations of social change in perceptions of gender roles, and focuses her attention primarily on pieces made during the Cultural Revolution. Through analyzing these representations, and contextualizing what they represent and their larger  meanings, we can begin to get a sense of how perceptions of gender and gender equality have changed within China both historically, and contemporarily.

Although a very casual and informal approach to her subjects, Cathryn also has her own websites, complete with commentary on pieces she has encountered, reviews, and thoughts on the sources she has read can be found here.

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