Joseph W. Ho 

Associate Professor of History, Albion College Center Associate, Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan

This talk reconstructs images and imaging technologies that once linked Chinese communities, American missions, and Sino-US encounters over the first half of the twentieth century. Cameras and visual devices accompanied American Protestant and Catholic missionaries as they undertook cultural, political, and religious projects in Republican China through the first years of the People’s Republic. These evolving visual practices and products ultimately escaped their missionary molds and entered transpacific perspectives, coloring Chinese engagements with the world alongside American views of modern China and East Asia. This talk explores intersections between image-making, transnational imaginations, and historical trajectories of visual material – all of which transformed twentieth century Sino-US encounters on both sides of the lens. 

Bio: 

Joseph W. Ho is Associate Professor of History at Albion College, Michigan, and a Center Associate at the University of Michigan’s Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies. He is a historian of modern East Asia, Sino-US encounters, and transnational visual culture and media. He has published essays on his research in several edited volumes, as well as the UCLA Historical Journal, U.S. Catholic Historian, and Education About Asia. Ho is the author of Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2022). 

Ho is currently preparing two new books, Time Exposures: Catholic Photography and the Evolution of Modern China (under contract, Hong Kong University Press) and Bamboo Wireless: Mediating the Cold War in Asia. In 2024–2025, he holds fellowships at Stanford University and the University of Michigan, as well as the EDS-Stewart Distinguished Research Fellowship at Boston College