Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Areas of Interest
- Modern Chinese history
- Historiography
- Social movements
- Comparative socialism
- Transnational intellectual exchange
Biography
Mark Lush is a PhD candidate in the Department of East Asian Studies specializing in modern Chinese history. His research examines how history was mobilized as a political resource in Maoist China. In his dissertation, Mobilizing the Past: Shaping Historical Consciousness in the Cultural Revolution, he explores how historiographical debates informed political culture in 1960s China and shaped the Cultural Revolution, one of the most consequential political campaigns of the twentieth century. Drawing on archival materials, travel diaries, and contemporary publications, he combines intellectual and social-historical approaches to analyze how historians, officials, and ordinary citizens were called on to reimagine the relationship between the past and the present as part of the ongoing campaign, a process that generated new forms of historical consciousness whose meanings and political effects were unpredictable and often contested.
He is also active in public history, with projects that explore transnational intellectual and political exchange. In 2025, he co-curated a bilingual exhibition at the University of Toronto’s Chengyu East Asian Library on the life and legacy of James G. Endicott, a Canadian missionary, educator, and peace activist who played a key role in shaping China–Canada relations in the twentieth century. A digital version of the exhibition is available through the University of Toronto Libraries. https://exhibits.library.utoronto.ca/exhibits/show/the-life-and-legacy-of-james-g/_intro
Awards
2025 Federation of Chinese Canadian Professionals Fellowship
2024 Mandarin Language Training Award
2024 Julia Ching Memorial Fellowship
2022 Huayu Enrichment Scholarship
2020 Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship-Doctoral
2018 Ontario Graduate Scholarship