The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures warmly congratulates Yating Li, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate, on receiving both the 2026–27 HRI Campus Fellowship, themed “Up Against Erasure,” and the 2026 Illinois Global Institute Summer Research Fellowship. Her dissertation project, “Pathologizing the Womb: Medical Knowledge, Women’s Body, and Mirage of Health in China (1900s–1940s),” examines the intersections of gender, medicine, and modernity in Republican-era China. These prestigious awards recognize the originality and significance of her research, and we are delighted to celebrate her achievement.
Yating Li is a fourth-year Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her academic background encompasses modern Chinese history, international politics, Chinese philosophy, and gender studies. With a primary research interest in gender and medicine, her proposed dissertation, titled "Pathologizing the Womb: Medical Knowledge, Women’s Body, and Mirage of Health in China (1900s-1940s)", seeks to analyze how diverse discourses around womb maladies emerged, circulated, and influenced both medical practices and individual experiences of illness, thereby shedding light on the broader tensions around health, modernity, gender, and sex in Republican Era.