Yangyou Fang is a scholar of Global Iberian cultural history. Her research examines migration, race, knowledge production, and intercultural exchange across the early modern Spanish world, with a particular focus on multi-ethnic Asian communities and their intellectual and religious agency in the face of racialized violence.

Her book project, China and the Chinese in the Making of the Spanish Pacific (1571–1815), explores how diverse Chinese and mestizo communities navigated imperial boundaries, drew on multiple intellectual and religious traditions, and articulated forms of solidarity that were transcultural, translinguistic, and transreligious. Her current research extends these interests to transimperial encounters between the Spanish and British empires and the circulation of knowledge through networks connected to the British East India Company.

She holds a PhD in Spanish and Latin American Studies from Princeton University. Before pursuing an academic career, she worked as a software engineer in Glasgow.

Research interests

• Global Iberian Cultural Histories
• Asia and Latin America
• Migration and Diaspora
• Transimperial Knowledge Production
• Sino-Hispanic Comparative Literature

Teaching

Yangyou Fang has taught courses in Spanish language, literature and culture, comparative and world literature, and global history.

At King’s College London, she teaches Spanish, Latin American, and Comparative Literature courses from global and transregional perspectives.

Expertise and public engagement

She is committed to expanding access to higher education and working with underserved learning communities. Prior to joining King’s, she taught students pursuing college degrees while incarcerated in New Jersey state prisons.

Selected publications

• “Not Just Merchants and Laborers: Chinese Literacy and Cosmopolitan Knowledge Production in the Spanish Pacific.” Migrating Minds. Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism 3, no. 2 (2025): 29–65.
• “Writing Anti-Colonial Resistance and Transculturation in the Early Modern Spanish Pacific: Letters to the King of Spain from Chinese Communities in Manila.” The Routledge Companion to Race in Early Modern Artistic, Material, and Visual Production, edited by Nicholas R. Jones et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2025, pp. 421–432.
• “‘Indescribable Misery’ (Mis)Translated: A Letter from Manila’s Chinese Merchants to the Spanish King (1598).” Spanish Pacific, 1521–1815, A Reader of Primary Sources, vol. 2, edited by Christina Lee and Ricardo Padrón, Amsterdam University Press, 2024, pp. 37–50.
• “La China del Don Quijote, el Don Quijote de la China.” Cervantes Global, edited by Francisco Ramírez Santacruz and Antonio Sánchez Jiménez, Iberoamericana Editorial Vervuert, 2022, pp. 83–104. (First author with Christina Lee)