Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences - Institute of Asian and African Studies

E-Mail

laura.pflug[at]alumni.hu-berlin.de

Biographical note

From 2021 to 2022, Laura Pflug is conducting the project „Nuclear Entanglements between Taiwan, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the People´s Republic of China in the Cold War Era (1960-1989) – Nuclear Exports between Nonproliferation and Technology Transfer”, which is affiliated with the Department of East Asian Studies of Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and supported by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. She completed her PhD at Ruhr University Bochum in January 2020 (summa cum laude), where she subsequently became an Associated Researcher, focusing in her thesis on the political and intellectual shaping of spaces in 18th and 19th century China based on the case study of Mount Hua (Huashan 華山). For her PhD project she has conducted two months of fieldwork in Shaanxi province, China. From July 2016 to December 2019, she has been a Research Fellow at Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig, Research Area „Geovisualizations”, in the research group „Maps of Globalization: The Production and the Visualization of Spatial Knowledge” from the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1199: „Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition”. Within this project she analyzed Chinese cartographic visualizations from the mid-19th century to the present day. After studying in Berlin and Taiwan with a scholarship of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation („Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes”), she received an M.A. in Sinology and History and Society of South Asia from Humboldt U Berlin, where she taught courses on modern and classical Chinese as well as Chinese history and culture after graduation.

Research interests

• Taiwan Studies
• Nuclear history and technology transfer East Asia
• Cold War history East Asia
• Chinese local gazetteers
• Chinese cartography and spatial imaginations

Publications

• Pflug, Laura (monograph, 2022) Chroniken des Blütenberges: Ordnung, Moral und Staatskunst in qingzeitlichen Beschreibungen des Huashan 華山 [Chronicles of the Flowery Mountain: Order, Morality, and Statecraft in Qing Era Gazetteers of Mount Hua (Huashan)]. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag (Asien- und Afrikastudien der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin).
• Pflug, Laura. “A View from Inside: Chinese Mapping of the World Against the Backdrop of Colonial Experience”. In: Mapping Empires: Colonial Cartographies of Land and Sea, Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography, eds. Alexander James Kent, Soetkin Vervust, Imre Josef Demhardt, Nick Millea (Cham, Switzerland: Springer 2020): 61-74.
• Pflug, Laura. “From ‘All Under Heaven’ to ‘China in the World’: Chinese Visual Imaginations from the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries”. In Mapping Asia: Cartographic Encounters Between East and West, Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography, eds. Martijn Storms, Mario Cams, Imre Josef Demhardt, Ferjan Ormeling (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019): 247–263.
• Cherrier, Pierre / Moser, Jana / Lentz, Sebastian / Pflug, Laura (2019) Raumformate und Kartensprachen erkennen: Vorschlag einer Methodik zur Analyse von Karten und (Schul)Atlanten als Vermittler von Weltbildern unter Globalisierungsprozessen [Recognizing spatial formats and map languages: Proposing a methodology for analyzing maps and (school) atlases as mediators of worldviews under globalization processes]. Leipzig, Leipzig University Press. 46 pages (Working paper series of the SFB 1199 at Leipzig University; 19).