Dr. Amanda Shuman – Institut für Sinologie

Short bio

Amanda Shuman is lecturer, researcher, and coordinator of the MA in Modern China Studies program. She joined the University of Freiburg in 2016 as database administrator and member of the ERC-funded Maoist Legacy Project after completing a post-doc at the International Institute for Asian Studies (Leiden). She received her PhD in History (with a focus on East Asia) from the University of California Santa Cruz in December 2014. During her dissertation research, she was a visiting student scholar at Beijing Sport University. She studied Chinese in Beijing, Dalian, and at the ICLP-National Taiwan University program in Taipei. Shuman also holds a BS in Information Technology, with honors magna cum laude, from Virginia Tech and prior to graduate school worked for several years as a web developer and webmaster for the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University.

For more information, visit her personal website.

Publications

Books

Exercising Socialism: The Politics of Sport Under Mao (book manuscript, under review).

Co-editor with Daniel Leese, Justice After Mao: The Politics of Historical Truth in the People’s Republic of China (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Chapters & Articles

“Taking Nature into Account? The International Olympic Committee Confronts Environmental Issues (1960s-1990s).” Co-authored with Philippe Vonnard. (Journal of Olympics Studies, forthcoming)

“Producing Socialist Bodies: Transnational Sports Networks and Athletes in 1950s China.” In Anja Blanke, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Julia C. Strauss, eds., Revolutionary Transformations: The People’s Republic of China in the 1950s (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

“Within or outside international sport? Chinese leaders in the 1950s and 1960s.” In Staps, Volume 125, Issue 3, 2019.

“Learning from the Soviet Big Brother: The Early Years of Sport in the People’s Republic of China.” In Robert Edelman and Chris Young, eds., The Whole World Was Watching: Sport in The Cold War (Stanford University Press, 2019).

“‘You challenge yourself and you’re not afraid of anything!’ Women’s narratives of running in Shanghai.” Co-authored with Noora Ronkainen. Sociology of Sport Journal, September 2018.

“Friendship is solidarity: The Chinese ping pong team visits Africa in 1962.” In Simon Rofe, ed., Sport and Diplomacy: Games within Games (Manchester University Press, 2018), 110-129.

“No longer ‘sick’: Visualizing ‘victorious’ athletic bodies in 1950s China.” Historical Social Research 43 (2018) 2: 220-50.

“Giving ‘prominence to politics’: African sportsmen visit China in the early Cultural Revolution.” In Kathryn Batchelor and Xiaoling Zhang, eds., China-Africa Relations: Building Images through Cultural Cooperation, Media Representation and Communication (London: Routledge, 2017), 51-72.

“‘Running Fever’: Understanding runner identity in Shanghai through turning point narratives.” Co-authored with Noora Ronkainen, Ting Ding, Shilun You, and Lin Xu. Leisure Studies, May 2017.

“A Champion for Socialist China.” Afro-Asian Visions blog, June 7, 2016.

“‘China, why not?’ Serious leisure and transmigrant runners’ stories from Beijing.” Co-authored with Noora Ronkainen, Marlen Harrison, and Tatiana Ryba. Leisure Studies, February 2016.

“From Soviet kin to Afro-Asian leader: The People’s Republic of China and international sport in the early 1960s.” Comparativ, Volume 23, Issue 3, 2013.

“Elite competitive sport in the People’s Republic of China 1958-1966: The Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO).” Journal of Sport History, Volume 40, Number 2, Summer 2013. (awarded best journal article of the year)

Translations & Reviews

Translation (Chinese to English), “‘A Different Category of Life: The Counterrevolutionary Case of a Rural Schoolteacher’ by Wang Haiguang” in Daniel Leese and Puck Engman, eds., Victims, Perpetrators, and the Role of Law in Maoist China: A Case-Study Approach (Oldenbourg: de Gruyter, 2018).

Film review, “Leap (夺冠 Duoguan, China 2020, directed by Peter Chan).” Revue – Les Sports modernes, Spring 2024.

Book review, “The Olympic Games, the Soviet Sports Bureaucracy, and the Cold War: Red Sport, Red Tape by Jenifer Parks.” Journal of Sport History, Summer 2018.

Book review, “Farewell to the God of Plague: Chairman Mao’s Campaign to Deworm China by Miriam Gross.” Twentieth-Century China, October 2017.

Book review, “Doing fieldwork in China…with Kids! by Candice Cornet and Tami Blumenfield (eds).” New Asia Books, November 2016.

Book review, “Sporting Gender: Women Athletes and Celebrity-Making During China’s National Crisis, 1931-1945 by Gao Yunxiang.” Women and Gender in Chinese Studies Review, December 2014.

Review, “China After the Sino-Soviet Split: Maoist Politics, Global Narratives, and the Imagination of the World by Zachary Scarlett.” Dissertation Reviews, November 2014.

“Fresh from the Archives: The Foreign Ministry Archives of the People’s Republic of China.” Dissertation Reviews, February 2012.

“In Search of Old Chinese Films.” The China Beat, March 2011.

“Interview: Eric Gordon on Participatory Chinatown.” HASTAC, March 2010.