Iris Ma

Biography & Research

Iris Ma serves as assistant dean of experiential learning and associate teaching professor at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She is also a core-affiliated faculty member of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies.

In addition to her administrative responsibilities, Ma teaches courses and conducts research on Chinese history and culture. She is a trained literary and cultural historian specializing in late imperial China and the modern Chinese-speaking world. Her work engages with questions related to gender, popular religion, Cross-Strait cultural exchange, and “Chinese-ness,” and investigates how the past has shaped and continues to influence the contemporary Chinese-speaking world.

Ma’s research examines Chinese narrative tradition and cultural products generated in print, on screen, and in cyberspace in an effort to better understand and explain how ideas, particularly popular perceptions of and responses to socio-political changes, were created, disseminated, and appropriated through popular writing and viewing. She has published articles in top peer-reviewed journals including Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review. Her chapter on the making of Taiwanese martial arts literature recently appeared in the edited volume "Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context: Being and Becoming" (Routledge, 2019). She is currently working on her first book, which examines the metamorphosis of Chinese martial arts literature and culture from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.

Prior to arriving at Notre Dame in 2019, Ma was a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and a visiting assistant professor at Southwestern University, where she conducted research and taught courses on China. In 2017, she taught Chinese history at Peking University in China.

Ma holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), an M.A. from the National University of Singapore (NUS), and a BA from Fudan University (Shanghai, China).

Honors & Awards

• Keough School Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award (2026)