"At Vision's Edge: Modern China, the United States, and Global Encounters in Lost Photographs and Film" ft. Dr. Joseph Ho

This talk reconstructs images and photographic technologies that linked American missions and Chinese communities over the first half of the twentieth century. Cameras and visual devices accompanied American Protestant and Catholic missionaries as they undertook cultural, political, and religious projects in the Republic of China (1911–1949) through the first years of the People’s Republic of China (1949 onward). Evolving photography and filmmaking ultimately escaped missionary molds, coloring Chinese engagements with the world alongside US views of modern East Asia. This talk explores links between image-making, transpacific imaginations, and historical afterlives of visual material – all of which shaped experiences between China and the United States on both sides of the lens. 

Dr. Joseph W. Ho is the academic program manager for the University of Michigan Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, center associate at the University of Michigan Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, and associate in research at the Harvard University Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. He is a historian of modern China and Taiwan, Sino-US encounters, and global visual culture. He has held fellowships at Stanford University, the University of Michigan, Yale University, and Boston College.

Ho is the author of Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2022). In addition, Ho is the co-editor of War and Occupation in China: The Letters of an American Missionaries from Hangzhou, 1937–1938 (Lehigh University Press, 2017) and the co-author of Time Exposures: Catholic Photography and the Evolution of Modern China (Hong Kong University Press, 2026).