Mark Lush

Mark Lush is a PhD candidate in modern Chinese history at the Department of East Asian Studies. Interested in the relationship between history and politics, his research focuses on the presence of China’s past as a prominent feature of Mao-era political campaigns. His dissertation, tentatively titled “Mobilizing the Past: Historical Thought and Cultural Revolution,” seeks to understand how longstanding debates, which concerned how China’s past should be narrated in a way that served the political demands of its socialist present, helped launch and sustain one of the most consequential campaigns in Chinese history. He combines elements of intellectual and social history to explore how people deployed different modes of historical engagement, some new and others familiar, toward pursuing state-sponsored goals or, at times, in the service of their own political interests.