Xinge Zhai received her previous intellectual training at the University of Hong Kong, King’s College London, and the Graduate Institute Geneva, graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences (major: Geography) and a Master’s degree in Development Studies. Before coming to Berlin, she worked in Prof. Michael Goebel’s project Patchwork Cities for one year as a research assistant.

Her main research interests lie in the histories of cities, of economic development, and of inequality. Her current project, funded by the Elsa Neumann Scholarship, scrutinises and compares the changing economic geography of western India and the Lower Yangtze in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instead of focusing on prominent port cities like Bombay and Shanghai, the project explores to what extent port cities stimulated industrial and urban growth of the inland and why their roles varied across contexts. Outside the field of economic history, she is interested in historical geography, digital humanities (especially historical GIS), labour history, and the history of Chinese diaspora.