Annika Joest

Annika is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Chinese Studies at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Her dissertation analyzes the new “New Woman”, her categories and how she is presented and perceived in and by contemporary Chinese women’s magazines over the past 20 years. Magazines include state-owned magazines like Zhongguo Funü (Women of China), Chinese home-grown magazines Jiating (Family) and Funü zhi you (Women’s Friend/Companion) and the Chinese editions of international glossy magazines (Elle, Vogue, Cosmopolitan).

Annika holds a MA in Modern Chinese Studies from the University of Heidelberg. She also studied at Nankai University in Tianjin, China. Currently, she is working as a research assistant for “A New Approach to the Popular Press in China: Gender and Cultural Production, 1904-1937”.

Since March 2009 Annika is also research fellow of the project “Rethinking Trends – Transcultural Flows in Popular Spheres”, a subproject of the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” which is funded by the German Research Foundation.

Her project is titled "Global Supermothers and Superfathers: A New Transcultural Trend in the Popular Media?" and analyzes the depiction of mothers and fathers in popular media, especially in lifestyle magazines, women’s magazines, and on popular websites. It hopes to trace the transcultural travel which constructions and/or deconstructions of global “superparents” have made over the past ten years in selected countries (namely Germany, Great Britain, United States, China, Taiwan and India).