Faith Virago, a current senior at UNC studying Women’s and Gender Studies as well as Asian Studies-Chinese, has been selected as a 2021 Yenching Scholarship Recipient. The Yenching Academy is a fully funded residential program offering a wide array of interdisciplinary courses on China within broadly defined fields of the Humanities and Social Sciences. At Yenching Academy of Peking University. Faith plans to continue her studies of both the Chinese language and of women’s experiences in China. In graduate school, she hopes to reach fluency in Mandarin and start studying Cantonese and other dialects of Chinese.
As for her research in graduate school, she plans to continue the study she has started for her senior honors thesis. Her honor’s thesis research aims to analyze the effects of a cross-cultural transition from China to the US on Chinese women’s views of gender equality and feminism, while also serving as an archivist creating biographical sketches of their lives. Faith is passionate about combining gender studies and Chinese language, since there is particularly little scholarship on the experience of queer individuals in China.
