Zhengfeng Wang is a postdoctoral researcher in Environmental Humanities at the Institute for Area Studies.

More information about Zhengfeng Wang

Fields of interest

Trained as an architect in Shanghai and Barcelona, I have an extensive interest in topics on environment and technology from a transnational perspective. I previously worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in the project "Balancing Heritage and Sustainability in the Retrofit of Postwar Curtain Wall Highrises," funded by the Irish Research Council. My doctoral dissertation looks at three government-sponsored commercial buildings that mediated state power and economic life in Chinese cities.

Research

My current project aims to historicize the foodscape shaped by the adoption of mechanical refrigeration in treaty-port China from the late 19th century to the 1940s when society encountered and started embracing the artificial cold. From public venues to private premises, refrigerated space, as socio-technical systems, empowered diverse subjects and created a contact zone that linked the interest of every actor embedded in transnational networks. It participated as an infrastructure in modernizing the foodway, a process infused with mediation and frictions at local and global levels contesting the incomplete cold chain, which is commonplace nowadays.

Grants and awards

Scott Opler Emerging Scholar Fellowship, Society of Architectural Historians Annual International Conference, 2023.
Publication Grant, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2020.

Curriculum Vitae

Ph.D. in Art History, University College Dublin (2022)
M.Arch, Tongji University (2017)
M.B.Arch, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (2016)
B.Eng. in Architecture, Tongji University (2014)

Key publications

“The Central Market in Hong Kong: Urban Amenities in a Speculative Field,” in Mobs and Microbes: Global Perspectives on Market Halls, Civic Order and Public Health, ed. Leila Marie Farah and Samantha L. Martin (Leuven: Leuven University Press, March 2023), 99-128.

“Modernizing Urban Food Provisioning: The 1936 Shanghai Fish Market,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 83, no.1 (March, 2024): 83-103. 

Publications