Doctoral Candidate Zekun (Paul) Chen
Contact Information
Zekun (Paul) Chen
Karl Jaspers Centre
Voßstraße 2, Building 4400
Room 400.00.17
69115 Heidelberg
Germany
+49 (0) 6221 54 4314
zekun.chen@hcts.uni-heidelberg.de
About
Paul Chen is a Ph.D. student at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies. He is interested in the conceptual, cultural, and social history of ethics, emotions, and food, with a focus on the Chinese-speaking world in the global nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Paul’s doctoral research at Heidelberg examines the contested political implications and diverse embodied experiences of vegetarian foodways (素食) in twentieth-century China and beyond. In this project, Paul explores how global and local entanglements among people, knowledge, and more-than-human beings shaped historical epistemologies of food ethics, as well as which modalities of human agency enacted through food practices were recognized, proliferated, or suppressed during periods of social transition and crisis.
With previous experience in journalism and public art, Paul also writes for public media outlets on food system transitions and continues to experiment with food-centered community art organizing.