My name is Jami Wilson and I am a first year Graduate student in the History MA program at UCCS with a special interest in Chinese History and Gender Studies. I graduated from Pacific Lutheran University in 2014, double majoring in Chinese Studies and Nonfiction Writing, with a GPA of 3.8. After receiving my MA, I plan to pursue a Ph.D. in Asian History or East Asian Studies with a focus on China. During my History MA program, I will be pursuing a theme of gender studies through three different sequences of readings and research courses. Gender roles, most specifically the implications of women as mothers across different societies, will tie together my studies in different fields of history. Alongside my courses, I have also been volunteering at the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) Archives since September, processing all of the East Asian documents from the manuscript collection into Past Perfect Museum Software with folder-level descriptions for the purpose of creating a clear finding tool and digitally preserving historical documents.

In fall 2015, Professor Yang Wei tutored me in an Independent Study Chinese History course and also in an Independent Study Chinese Historical Translation. In the Chinese History course, I studied China from its earliest known Dynasty to the 21st Century in order to get a general overview of China’s fluidity in time as a political and cultural entity. While translating various documents from Chinese to English, I developed an interest in the introduction of eugenics into China,which had strong ties to societal gender roles. This interest developed into my paper entitled "Eugenics, Nationalism, and Elitism in the Gender Roles of Republican China: Pan Guangdan's 'Teaching Women to Nurture their Children.'" This study explores Pan Guangdan (1898–1967), the Chinese sociologist who is credited with the introduction of eugenics to China, and his writings on gender roles, education reform, and new motherhood in relation to eugenics. Pan sought to apply eugenics to promoting motherhood based on his conviction that the production of wealth and culture was the duty of men and human reproduction was the duty of women. I will be presenting this paper at Harvard’s East Asia Society Conference 2016: Reimagining Asia February 20-21 with support from a UCCS History Graduate Student Travel Grant to attend this Conference. My paper was also accepted to the Columbia University Graduate Conference on East Asia February 26-27, but I will be unable to attend and present at this conference. I have also applied to present this paper as a poster at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious professional historical organization, in January 2017.