I am an Associate Professor at the Centre for History at Sciences Po in Paris, and received my PhD from the University of California, Irvine. I previously held permanent positions at Monash University in Melbourne and the University of Manchester where my research focused on local society and governance during ecological crisis in prerevolutionary China, resulting in Famine Relief in Warlord China (Harvard, 2019). I then considered the ways that memory and forgetting of what people did, and did not do, during famine figured in missionary and Maoist ideology in Modern Erasures: Revolution, the Civilizing Mission, and the Shaping of China’s Past (Cambridge, 2022). I’m currently revisiting moments of paradigmatic shifts in academic analysis—the spread of “the savage” in 19th century ethnology, “the peasant” in 20th century rural studies, and “humanitarianism” in 21st century academia generally—to better flesh out the role of ideology in social scientific practice during the peaks of colonial expansion, modernisation theory and neoliberalism.