Yunning Zhang is the Arnaldo Momigliano Postdoctoral Scholar at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, where she received her Ph.D. in August 2025. Bridging global early modern studies, critical race studies, and Asian American studies, her research examines how race, religion and aesthetics intersect in textual sources and visual arts of colonial Latin America and Iberian Asia. More broadly, her teaching and scholarship engage questions of extractive and settler colonialism, queer relationalities in the archive, and the afterlives of transpacific slavery and indenture labor in contemporary visual, literary, and curatorial practices. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Colonial Latin American Studies, postmedieval, ASAP/Review, GLQ, Romance Notes, and Symposium. She is also currently teaching at Parsons School of Design (The New School).