Zhenwu Qiu is a 2026-2027 China Scholarship Council Visiting Scholar at the Southeast Asia Program. He is a lecturer in the Department of History at Nanjing Normal University, China, and holds a PhD from Tsinghua University (2023). He was previously a visiting researcher at King’s College London (2021–2022). His research examines the environmental and technological history of maritime Asia from a global perspective. His earlier work focused on tropical cyclones and the making of storm-warning networks in the colonial Indian Ocean, tracing how meteorological knowledge and communication technologies were produced and circulated across imperial boundaries. He has published in the Indian Economic and Social History Review and is currently working on his first book, Facing the Storms: Tropical Cyclones, Storm-Warning Networks, and Colonial Uncertainties in the Indian Ocean.

At Cornell, he is turning to Hainan Island in the early People’s Republic of China, investigating how the island helped integrate China into the Global South through the movement of labor, tropical plants (rubber, coffee, and coconut), technology, and knowledge. He is particularly interested in the role of non-human actors in this process – cold waves, typhoons, spores, and insects – and how they shaped the possibilities and limits of socialist tropical development. He has already conducted preliminary fieldwork in Hainan and plans to continue. More broadly, he seeks to move Hainan beyond the framework of Chinese national history, situating the island within the worlds of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Global South – connecting it to Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and beyond to South America and Africa. He is ready to exchange ideas with colleagues at Cornell and scholars who share an interest in environmental history and Global South studies.