Assistant Professor for Chinese Art History / Academic advisor  Dr. Monica Klasing Chen

My habilitation project analyses the formation of habits in China, with a focus on art and crafts. The project studies normative texts that prescribe behavior in relation to material culture from the 19th and 20th- centuries. I investigate practices of recycling, changing meanings of material culture, and new habits that take the mechanization of household labor into account. The project discusses “mistakes” and “bad habits,” as well as trends related to recycling and frugality, engaging scholarly debates on waste, Gender Studies and Intellectual History. 

As a member of the "Common Knowledge" working group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Knowledge, I am developing a digital humanities project with Dr. Shih-Pei Chen. The project makes use of visual analysis technologies to explore transcultural transfers of visual materials between China and Japan. I also studying the use of hand charts in Chinese daily-use encyclopedias and manuals, as a member of the academic network of the Knowing Hands project, led by Marta Hanson and Stéphanie Homola.

In my dissertation project, I analyzed changing attitudes toward remembering practical knowledge from the Ming through the late Qing dynasty, discussing the use and different formats of mnemonic aids. Issues addressed by the project include the codification of knowledge in the field of arts and how non-elite knowledge was disseminated through print.

Klasing Chen, Monica. 2025. “Laughing at the Past: Resignifying ‘Waste’ in Early Republican China.” In (Re)made in China: Material (Dis)connections, Art, and Creative Reuse, 53­­‑76, edited by Anna Grasskamp. De Gruyter Brill. 

Klasing Chen, Monica. 2023. "Between remembrance and commerce: Writing a painting treatise in nineteenth-century Shanghai." Memory Studies 16, 5: 1313-1327. 

Klasing Chen, Monica. 2020. “Memorable Arts: The Mnemonics of Painting and Calligraphy in Late Imperial China.” PhD thesis, Leiden University. Open Access: 

Klasing Chen, Monica. 2017. “Translating Practical Knowledge: Three Theories of Portraiture from the Mid-Qing Dynasty.” In Faces of China – Portrait Painting of the Ming and Qing Dynasties (1368-1912), edited by Klaas Ruitenbeek, 75-84. Berlin: Berlin State Museums and Michael Imhof Verlag.

Since 2023  Working group member “Common Knowledge and its Sources in the Sinosphere, 14th to 20th Centuries,” Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. 

Since 2021  Member of organizing committee for the “Forum Ostasiatische Kunstgeschichte im deutschsprachigen Raum.” 

2020–2023  Editor of the Journal of the History of Knowledge Blog.