Matthew Kohrman

Kohrman will write a monograph examining cigarettes in China’s post-Mao era. His work will contribute in innovative ways to critical perspectives on global health as well as theory building regarding biopolitics. Kohrman will analyze the governing logics, languages, and ethics that have come to configure the cigarette in and outside the People’s Republic of China as a source of life promotion and death making. He also will explore how people have accrued forms of authority in urban China by managing the relationship between the cigarette, life, and death, and how that authority influences and is influenced by forms of subjectivity and sociality among residents of urban China.