Sally Chengji Xing (PhD, Columbia University) is a visiting fellow of the Max Planck Institute of History of Science (Berlin) and the University of Göttingen in the project “Worldmaking from a Global Perspective: A Dialogue with China.” She is now the associate professor at Nankai University and fellow of Nankai’s “Hundred Young Academic Leaders Program”. Before joining the Faculty of History at Nankai University, Sally studied at US history Tsinghua University (2008-2013), Peking University (2013-5), and was a residential fellow at Robert H. Smith International Center in Virginia (2017). She has taught US history as a graduate teaching fellow at Purdue University (2015-6), Columbia University (2017-2021), and served as an undergraduate advisor at the American Studies Center at Columbia University (2018-22).

     Sally writes in both English and Chinese, and has published numerous academic reviews, journal articles and public history writings on topics of US history and transnational history. She also co-translated Akira Iriye’s Global and Transnational History into Chinese, and edited an interview with leading Americanists entitled History in Practice, a project twice won the History in Action Award of the Mellon Foundation. As a researcher, she is interested in looking at US history and history of science from transnational and global perspectives. Her book manuscript in progress, “Pacific Crossings” (based on her dissertation at Columbia University in the City of New York: https://doi.org/10.7916/pax4-tr49) examines how and to what extent American intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century influenced the development of Chinese science. Her multi-archival research in China and the United States was funded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), the Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Rockefeller Archive Center, the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine and by other graduate research fellowships at Columbia University in the City of New York. 

     Sally became interested in the Sino-American intellectual exchanges network behind the China Foundation network when she resided in Morningside Heights since 2016. At Columbia, Sally worked closely with Professors Mae Ngai, Casey Blake, Eric Foner, Ira Katznelson, Victoria de Grazia, Alice Kessler-Harris, Richard John and Marwa Elshakry. At MPIWG in Berlin, she is a member of the Lise Meitner Research Group China in the Global System of Science”. She works on three research projects with her colleagues, on 1) the history of the China Foundation, 2) Digitalizing the China Foundation Social Network (with Dr. Chen Shih-Pei), and 3) “The Entry of India and China into the Global Production of Scientific Knowledge” (with Profs. Drs. Arnab Rai Choudhuri and Erik Baark).

     Her long-term research explores Sino-American intellectual history in transnational approaches, from early 20th century all the way to the late 1960s. At Peking University, as an MA student in the field of US history, Sally studied Thomas Paine’s transatlantic experiences in Britain, France and the United States at Peking University, and went to Robert H. Smith International Center for Thomas Jefferson Studies as a residential fellow. After finishing the research on the China Foundation, Sally will plan to launch her research project on the Two Toms Paradox” together with Dr. Li Haimo. This project explores how Chinese intellectuals since the early twentieth century have understood republicanism and the paradoxes of American democracy.