Faculty

Lily Hope Chumley

Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication

Lily Hope Chumley


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Lily Hope Chumley is an anthropologist (specializing in linguistic and semiotic anthropology) with research focusing on formations of media and material culture, political and commodity aesthetics in China and Taiwan. She was trained at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, “Self-styling: Practicing Creativity and Remaking Aesthetics in Postsocialist China,” is an ethnography of changing subjectivities produced through art schools and the design industries in the P.R.C., based on two years of research in Beijing and Shandong funded by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. She is developing a new research project, “Gaming the World System: Currency Play at the Bank of China,” which looks at Chinese women’s small-scale currency speculation as a private geopolitics mediated by state-run financial news, and co-editing a journal issue on the semiotics of qualia.


Degrees Held

  • PhD University of Chicago 2011
    Anthropology
  • BA Reed College 2002
    Philosophy

Selected Presentations

  • Seeing Strange: Chinese Aesthetics in a Foreign World.
    At American Anthropological Association 2010 annual meeting
  • Back Doors and Witchcraft: On Success and Failure in the Chinese Art Test System.
    In conference "Qualia: Anthropological Explorations in the Experience of Qualities", University of Chicago, 2010
  • Intimate Compulsions: Art Test Fever in China.
    At IUAES International Conference, Yanan University, Kunming, China, 2009
  • What are you trying to say?: Trying and Failing to speak with Things.
    At Michicagoan Linguistic Anthropology Conference, University of Michigan Ann Arbor 2009
  • Creativity and Capitalism in the Central Academy of Fine Arts.
    At IL/IN Dissertation Workshop on East Asian Education, Indiana University Bloomington, 2008
  • Yuyan Renleixue he Jiaoyu yanjiu (Linguistic Anthropology and Education Research).
    At Anthropology Conference, Peking University Sociology/Anthropology Department, 2008
  • Reluctant Commodities and Parallel Modernities in Western Chinese Art History.
    At Symposium: Rethinking the Field of East Asian Art History, University of Chicago
  • The Symbolic Industry in the Modern City: Cultural Policy, Art and Commodification in Taiwan.
    At Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations, Panel: Visualizing Asia, Tokyo, Japan, 2005

Courses

Semiotics of Art and Performance (und)

MCC-UE 1310 Culture and Media in Urban China (und)

MCC-UE 1023 East Asian Media and Popular Culture (und)