Faculty

Qiran Shang

Assistant Professor

Qiran Shang is an assistant professor of architecture at Louisiana State University. Her scholarly interests focus on relationships between the built environment and questions of power, agency, and social and political justice. She holds a Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds Master of Architecture and Bachelor of Architecture degrees from Southeast University in Nanjing.

Her doctoral dissertation examines the relationship between spatial governance and queer collective life in post socialist China. It traces how architectural and urban types were mobilized to stimulate economic development and reinforce heteronormative regulation, yet also generated conditional openings for queer sociality. By treating the built environment as an active medium through which both governance and social agency take spatial form, the research complicates accounts of spatial politics organized around a simple opposition between domination and resistance.

Portions of this research are currently under review as a journal article and a chapter in an edited volume; related work has appeared in PLATFORM. The dissertation has been supported by a Graham Foundation grant, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation award, and research travel grants from the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.