Kelsey Granger (Co-Founder) is a sinologist and historian of dynastic China and the wider Silk Roads, specialising in material culture, gender, and animal history. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 2022 with a thesis focusing on lapdog-keeping among elite women in seventh–tenth century China. She was then awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich where she worked with excavated documents from Xuanquan to access the lives of postal horses on the fringes of China’s Han empire. In 2024, she will be starting an IASH-HCA Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh returning to the topic of lapdogs, this time in the context of nineteenth-century Britain.
Renée Krusche (Co-Founder) is a Research Fellow and Lecturer (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) in Sinology at Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen-Nürnberg. She studied Chinese Studies alongside English and American Studies at FAU. In 2022 she published her dissertation The Healthy Socialist Life in Maoist China, 1949-1980 with Lexington. Her research interests include the history of science and medicine, gender in Chinese and Asian history, and human-animal relationships. More recently, she has been working on the history of veterinary medicine in imperial and twentieth-century China.
Anne Schmiedl (Co-Founder) is Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the Institute of Sinology and East Asian Studies at the University of Münster. She previously studied Chinese Studies, Japanese Studies, and English Cultural Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen-Nürnberg, with research stays in Jinan, Taipei, Tokyo, Yamaguchi, and Seoul. Her dissertation was published with Brill as Chinese Character Manipulation in Literature and Divination: The Zichu by Zhou Lianggong (1612-1672). Her research interests include the literature and culture of late imperial China, the history of mantic methods, women in Chinese literature, processes of cultural transfer between China and Japan, as well as animal studies.