Laurence Coderre

Director of Undergraduate Studies, Associate Professor

Laurence Coderre is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at New York University. She received her PhD in Chinese from UC Berkeley in 2015 after which she held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Michigan. Coderre’s work focuses on Chinese socialist and postsocialist cultural production. Newborn Socialist Things: Materiality in Maoist China (Duke, 2021), her monograph examining the material culture of the Cultural Revolution, received an honorable mention for the 2022 MLA First Book Prize. Her research has also appeared in Comparative Studies of Society and History, Journal of Material Culture, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and Journal of Chinese Cinemas, as well as numerous edited volumes. She is currently embarking on a new project on theory and the everyday in the late Mao era.

Areas of Research/Interest

Modern Chinese cultural studies
Material culture
Socialism and postsocialism
The Cultural Revolution
Third World internationalism
Disability studies

Education

A.B. 2007, Music and East Asian Studies, Harvard University
A.M. 2009, Regional Studies-East Asia, Harvard University, 
Ph.D. 2015, Chinese, UC Berkeley

External Affiliations

Association for Asian Studies
Modern Language Association
American Comparative Literature Association

Fellowships and Awards

  • 2015-2016 Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Study of China, Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan
  • 2014-2015 Dissertation Completion Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies
  • 2014-2015 Dissertation Fellowship, Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley
  • 2013-2014 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, US Department of Education
  • 2013-2014 International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Social Science Research Council

Publications

  • Newborn Socialist Things
    Materiality in Maoist China
    Duke University Press, 2021. (ISBN: 978-1-4780-1430-0)
    Laurence Coderre Newborn Socialist Things book

Selected Articles

  • Ma Ji’s “Ode to Friendship” and the Failures of Revolutionary Language
    Maoist Laughter, eds. Ping Zhu, Zhuoyi Wang, and Jason McGrath (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019) 179–96
  • A Necessary Evil: Conceptualizing the Socialist Commodity under Mao
    Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 61, no. 1 (2019) 23-49
  • Cultural Revolution Models on Film: The Third World Politics of Self-Reflexivity in On the Docks (1972)
    1968 and Global Cinema, eds. Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2018) 345–62
  • The Curator, the Investor, and the Dupe: Consumer Desire and Chinese Cultural Revolution Memorabilia
    Journal of Material Culture, vol. 21, no. 4 (2016) 429-447
  • Breaking Bad: Sabotaging the Production of the Hero in Amateur Performance of Yangbanxi
    Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution: The Translation of Musical Culture into Politics, eds. Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, and Tsan-huang Tsai (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) 65-84
  • Meaningful Mobility and the Ties That Bind: 1988 as Postsocialist Road Story
    Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 26, no. 2 (2014) 1-37
  • Counterattack: (Re)contextualizing Propaganda
    Journal of Chinese Cinemas, vol. 4, no. 3 (2010) 211-228