Shanni Zhao

Shanni Zhao is a sociocultural anthropologist. She received her Ph.D. from Anthropology Department at Harvard University with a secondary field in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her research interests focus on state-making, affect and sentiments, public and mediation, marriage and social reproduction, in both contemporary and 20-Century China. She is currently working on her book project. It takes the state investment in youth matchmaking as a vantage point to study the formation of affective public sphere in China’s metropolises, and, thereby, the relations between marriage-making and state-making, and between power and attraction. She has published two academic articles— “Transgenerational Transmission of Suffering: State Violence, Memory, and Aspiration for Alternative Intimate Lives in Contemporary China,” and “Animals with Parents: the Fictive Kinship of Contemporary China’s Body Politic”—and multiple non-fiction articles on this topic.