Asian Languages, Literatures Welcomes New Assistant Professor

Wu, a native of Hangzhou, China specializes in modern Chinese literature and intellectual history.

“Wesleyan’s commitment to the excellence of liberal arts education, its top-notch faculty, the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, and its convenient geographical location were all big attractions for me,” she says.

She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Chinese literature at Fudan University in Shanghai, with a special emphasis on the late imperial era.

In 1996, Wu came to the United States to study Western theories of literatures, cultural studies, and gender studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. There, she expanded her research to include Chinese prose narrative and poetry and intellectual history, with a focus on both new and traditional literary forms from the 1890s to the 1940s. Her dissertation was titled: “Classical Lyric Modernities: Poetics, Gender, and Politics in Modern China (1900-1937).”

At UCLA she received a Lenart Travel Fellowship through the Division of Humanities, a Research Assistantship through the Center for Chinese Studies; a Confucian Studies Fellowship and a Chancellor’s Dissertation Year Fellowship. In 2005-06, she received an An Wang Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University.

Wu has already taught numerous classes on Chinese-related topics. At UCLA she taught Chinese language and classical Chinese. At the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, she taught Chinese ghost stories, fourth-year Chinese readings in classical and modern literatures. At the University of Kentucky, she taught beginning Chinese, gender politics in Chinese literature, Chinese film and literature, and a course titled “All under Heaven: Conceptions of Chineseness over Time and Space.”

And at Wesleyan, this fall, she is teaching fourth-year Chinese and gender politics in modern Chinese literature. In the future, she will teach classes on Chinese film and culture.

“I’ve enjoyed the fact I am able to live across the cultures and help the students to gain some knowledge about China and East Asia,” she says.

Wu, who worked as an editor for the Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, is the author of essays and a book in Chinese. Her research paper “ ‘Old Learning’ and the Re-Feminization of Modern Space in the Lyric Poetry of Lü Bicheng (1883-1943)” appeared in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. She is preparing her book manuscript tentatively titled The Treasured Pagoda in Ruins: Poetics and Literati Communities in Modern China.