I am currently an assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. My teaching and research interests include medieval Chinese literature and culture, poetry and poetics, historiography, classical tales and their adaptations in vernacular genres and modern media, and comparative studies of the Chinese Middle Period and medieval Europe.

Born in Beijing, I received my BA in Chinese literature from Peking University, and MA and PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University.

I am currently working on a book manuscript titled, War of Words: Courtly Exchange, Rhetoric, and Political Culture in Early Medieval China. It examines the “discursive battles” fought among the rival states in China’s early medieval period (220-589) and investigates how rhetoric—the art of verbal persuasion—constructed and contested political legitimacy in this age of multipolarity. This project is generously supported by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Scholar Grant (http://www.cckf.org/en/news/2022052303).

My second book project, tentatively titled Bureaucracy and the Representation of Work in Medieval Chinese Poetry, studies the dialectic between poetry and bureaucratic systems, between the lyrical and quotidian renderings of “work” (e.g. working in the office, scribal and managerial work as a local governor, vacations) in medieval poetry. Aside from these two major projects, I’m also interested in doing research on historiography and modes of historical thinking from the early medieval period to Liu Zhiji 劉知幾 (661-721) in Tang.

I’m working on two articles at the moment: One analyzes verbal exchanges during diplomatic missions in early medieval China and the other examines the idea of “truthfulness” (shi 實) in Liu Zhiji’s Shitong.