About

I am a scholar of Chinese literature and culture and am interested broadly in the practices of reading, writing, publishing and performance in the 16th to 19th centuries. Drawing on archival research in China and Japan, my forthcoming book, The Vernacular World of Pu Songling: Popular Literature and Manuscript Culture in Late Imperial China (Brill, 2025), examines a diverse body of local writings in the manuscripts of village scholars from Shandong in northern China. I have also published articles on the scribal publishers of entertainment literature in 19th century Beijing, and maintain active interests in histories of print and popular culture. Before coming to Bates, I was a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at the University of Hamburg in Germany, a visiting scholar at New York University, and a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, where I received my PhD. Here at Bates, I am excited to teach a wide range of courses in Chinese language, literature and culture.

Articles and book chapters

“Pu Songling and his local rural world”, in Rania Huntington and Roland Altenburger eds., Approaches to Teaching Liaozhai’s Strange Tales (New York: Modern Language Association, forthcoming).

Chinese version: 百本張：十九世紀北京抄書坊研究, translated by Linda Chu 朱雯琪 and Heinrich Yen 顏涵銳, in 中國文哲研究通訊 (Newsletter of the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy), 34.3 (September 2024): 67-116.

“Touched by a Tale of Friendship: An Early 19th Century Zidishu Manuscript,” in Jörg Quenzer et al. ed., Exploring Written Artefacts, 2 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 2: 1099-1122.

“The Production of zidishu in Manuscript and Print During the Qing and Republican Eras: A Survey of the Extant Corpus,” CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, 37.2 (December 2018): 95-127.

“A Day in the Life of Pu Songling” (with Victor Mair), in David K. Schneider ed., The Poet as Scholar: Essays and Translations in Honor of Jonathan Chaves, Sino-Platonic Papers 272 (2017): 319-34.

Translations

Martin Gimm, “The Earliest Translation of the Novel Jin ping mei: The Manchu Translation of 1708,” in Vibeke Børdahl and Rick Lintao Qi eds., Jin Ping Mei: A Wild Horse in Chinese Literature (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press, 2022), 327-356. [Translated from German]

“The Mansion of Enchantment” [迷樓記] in Victor Mair and Zhang Zhenjun eds., Anthology of Tang and Song Tales: The Tang Song chuanqi ji of Lu Xun (Singapore: World Scientific, 2020), 541-554. [Translated from Chinese]

“Scrounging for a School, A Play by Pu Songling,” CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 33.1 (July 2014): 60-81. [Translated from Chinese, with introduction]

“Ex-husband” by Wang Baozhong, in Josh Stenberg ed., Irina’s Hat: New Short Stories from China (Portland, ME: MerwinAsia, 2013), 301-318. [Translated from Chinese]

Other publications

“A Friend of a Lifetime: On Yu Boya smashes his zither to mourn a dear friend, a youth book,” in Wiebke Beyer and Zhenzhen Lu eds., Manuscript of the Month / Manuskript des Monats, Hamburg: SFB 950 (Oct. 2017) [German version]

Book review for Bannermen Tales (Zidishu): Manchu Storytelling and Cultural Hybridity in the Qing Dynasty, by Elena Suet-Ying Chiu (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018), in Saksaha: A Journal of Manchu Studies, 16 (2019-2020): 59-61.