Tani Barlow, History/ Women Studies

Contact barlow@u.washington.edu

In the Event of Women

I am writing a history of middlebrow social theory and its
relation to transnational commercial advertising in the late Qing
dynasty and Republican eras (circa 1890-1937). Part of my objective is
to illustrate the advertising culture and the way it starred cute
women using trade marked, imported commodities and a body of
translated vernacular theories about society to voice the aspirations
of professional elites. To show how advertising culture and popular
sociology intersected I am collecting and archiving advertising
campaigns in three Chinese locations, Shanghai, Manchuria and
Tianjin/Beijing. My assistant Teresa Mares has already scanned several
years of research and her final          project is to enter the
material I gathered from Tianjins newspaper.