Author: yuanfeiwanglog
About me
I am assistant professor of Chinese and comparative literature at the University of Georgia.
I specialize in early modern Chinese literature, early modern Chinese historiography and travelogues of Southeast Asia and Japan, pirates and the maritime world in Chinese literature, and aspects of the vernacular in early modern China.
My first monograph titled Writing the Piracy War examines how in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when “Japanese” pirates raided southeast coastal China and when Hideyoshi invaded Korea, late Ming Chinese scholars composed histories and vernacular fiction to narrate outlaws, pirates, and the Ming empire’s wars against oceanic piracy. Arguing against current scholarship that late Ming Chinese scholars and their writings were insensitive to the world at large, this monograph shows that late Ming discourse on pirates and oceanic piracy was central to imagining and contesting China’s imperial identity, constructing the notion of authorship, fostering debates on vernacular fiction, and promoting the creation of literary canon in the Sinophere. I have received supports for this book from Nanlanda Sriwijaya Centre (2010), Social Science Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship for Transregional Research (2013-2014), UGA’s Faculty Research Fellowship (2018) and Faculty Research Grant (2017), and Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation International Scholarly Exchange Scholar Grant (2018-2019).
My second book, tentatively titled The Ocean and Chinese Literature in the Early Modern World, continues to investigate how the maritime trade and religious networks shaped the development and the transmission of Chinese literature and the identities of various communities in late imperial China and overseas. This book aims to focus more on material culture and visual culture to approach literary history.
Education
Ph.D, University of Pennsylvania, 2013
Exchange Scholar, Yale University, 2009-2010
MA, Columbia University, 2006
MA, University of British Columbia, 2004
BA, Nankai University, 2002
