William Schaefer

Dr William Schaefer is Associate Professor in Chinese Studies and Visual Culture at Durham University, examining photography's role in mediating relationships between nature and culture during environmental crisis. His research connects Chinese visual culture with global modernism through frameworks of media ecology and environmental humanities.

His award-winning book 'Shadow Modernism' (2017) analyzes how Shanghai's 1920s-1930s media culture transformed Chinese modernity through photographic abstraction and spatial representation. Current project 'Photographic Ecologies' investigates contemporary Chinese photographers who reconceptualize images as emergent from ecological processes rather than representations of environments.

Dr Schaefer supervises doctoral research on Sino-Soviet art education, contemporary Chinese photography, and transnational modernism. His publications explore material ecologies of photography, urban ruins as historical markers, and the globalization of modernist forms across East-West contexts.