Speaker Bio

Huang Chih-Yen Debby obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania after receiving her BA and MA degrees at National Taiwan University. She is currently a NSTC Research Scholar at Academia Sinica, where she serves as principal investigator of a research project funded by the National Science and Technology Council, titled Empire of Pleasure: The Art of Governing and Being Governed in Eighth-Century China. Her research lies at the intersection of institutional, cultural, and gender history in medieval China, with a focus on gender relations, public performance of emotion, and the ways institutions both enable and constrain action while also generating political and social capital. She is the author of Princess Politics: A Gendered Investigation into the Political History of Early Medieval China (2013, in Chinese; simplified Chinese edition forthcoming) and has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. Her recent article on the transcultural reception of a Buddhist tale, accepted by the Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology (2026, in Chinese). She is currently completing More Than Friends: Gender, Space, and the Making of Intimacy in Medieval China, 3rd–7th Centuries, a monograph that reconstructs how elites negotiated intimacy, trust, and social distance at the moment of first encounter with their friends’ relatives, revealing an underlying emotional order that shaped early medieval sociability.