"New BOOK Talk Series" 01 - Ma, Zhiying

The University of Chicago Center in Beijing

20th floor, Culture Plaza
No. 59A Zhong Guan Cun Street
Haidian District Beijing 100872

Join us at the University of Chicago Center in Beijing for a conversation on mental health through the lens of interpretive social sciences, featuring Prof. Zhiying Ma (University of Chicago) and Prof. Yungeng Li (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), with Prof. Jinhua Guo (Peking University) as discussant. Drawing on their recently published books, the two authors will explore how social, cultural, and historical contexts shape understandings of, experiences with, and approaches to mental illness. 

Zhiying Ma

Associate Professor at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. She holds a joint PhD in Comparative Human Development and Anthropology from the University of Chicago and bachelor's degrees in psychology and philosophy from Peking University. From 2016 to 2018, she was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Junior Fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor.

Trained in cultural and medical anthropology, her research focuses on mental health, disability, family and kinship, care, and social policy. She is the author of Between Families and Institutions: Mental Health and Biopolitical Paternalism in Contemporary China (Duke University Press, 2025) and has published multiple articles in leading journals in anthropology and related fields. Her recent work also involves community-engaged research on developing and evaluating peer support services for people with serious mental illnesses.

Yungeng Li

Associate Professor with Tenure and Doctoral Supervisor, School of Media and Communication, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He holds a PhD in Communication from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and was a Visiting Scholar at Yale School of Medicine. He serves as a board member of the Health Communication Committee of the Chinese Association for Journalism and Communication History.

His research interests center on mental health communication, digital culture and cross-cultural communication. He has published more than 30 articles in top-tier Chinese and English academic journals. He has co-edited five books, including Handbook of the History of Western Communication Scholarship and Intelligent Communication: Media Care and Media Empowerment.

He has led and completed multiple national and provincial research projects, including the National Social Science Fund of China (Post-Funding Program), the Humanities and Social Sciences Fund of the Ministry of Education of China, and Philosophy and Social Science projects of Shanghai.

His honors include the Outstanding Young Scholar Award from China Journalism and Communication Yearbook, the 7th Award of the Chinese Association for Journalism and Communication History (Fang Hanqi Prize), CNKI Top 1% Highly Cited Scholar, and the Best Paper Award from the Committee for the History of Communication Thought of the Chinese Association for Journalism and Communication History.