On leave for 2024 fall semester

Expertise

Literary and cultural history of late imperial China and the modern Chinese-speaking world; Chinese cinema; women’s and gender studies; history and storytelling

At the Keough School

Iris Ma serves as assistant dean for experiential learning and associate teaching professor. She also is a member of the Dean’s Cabinet. In her administrative role, Ma provides a framework, structure and resources to connect students’ classroom learning with real-world experiences, enabling them to develop practical and professional skills needed to become effective change agents. She builds collaborative projects with units of the Keough School and across campus, as well as organizations and networks around the world in order to advance experiential learning for Keough School undergraduate and master of global affairs students. The range of experiential learning activities include student research, internships, service, community engagement and other related programmatic areas. Prior to becoming the assistant dean for experiential learning, Ma served for five years as assistant dean for academic affairs.

Research and Publications

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.

Biography

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 PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), an MA from the National University of Singapore (NUS), and a BA from Fudan University (Shanghai, China).

News

• Teaching global affairs in the gallery