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Cameras and visual technologies accompanied American missionaries as they undertook cultural, political, and religious projects in Republican China through the first years of the People’s Republic. These evolving visual practices and products, however, ultimately escaped their missionary mold and entered global imaginations, coloring American views of modern China alongside Chinese engagements with the world. In this talk, Professor Ho explores intersections between image-making, contested identities, and transnational ways of seeing – many of which transformed 20th century Sino-US encounters on both sides of the lens.

Joseph W. Ho is Assistant Professor of History and Associate Director of the Prentiss M. Brown Honors Program at Albion College, as well as a Center Associate at the LRCCS. His research concerns transnational visual culture, histories of photography and film, global Christianity, and Sino-US experiences in modern East Asia. Professor Ho is the co-editor of "War and Occupation in China: The Letters of an American Missionary from Hangzhou, 1937-1938" (Lehigh University Press, 2017) and the author of "Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China" (Cornell University Press, 2021).