Elizabeth LaCouture
Affiliation
- Graduate Student Fellow, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Research
Elizabeth LaCouture is a PhD candidate in Modern Chinese History at Columbia University. Her research interests include gender and urban history in late 19th and early 20th century China, colonialism, modernity, and visual and material culture.
Dissertation Abstract:
My dissertation focuses on the modern home and family in Tianjin, China (1860-1949), and asks if and how private space formed the core of a growing urban middle-class in early 20th century China. Starting in the 19th century, urban populations surged, and the home increasingly became a site of consumption. Reformers, architects, urban residents, and municipal governments began to formulate new ideas about home and family. My dissertation examines the architecture and material culture of everyday life of homes in Tianjin, a city where eight foreign countries established extra-territorial concessions alongside a Chinese city. I argue that the home played a central role in forging new ideas about public and private, as well as gender, ethnicity, and social status. Between reformist rhetoric, popular print culture ideals, and the concrete conditions of urban life, modern Chinese families formed their own identities and created their own spaces.
