How do writers and filmmakers think about the relationship between the exploration of the possibilities of their medium and some form of responsibility—toward other beings, the world, and themselves—is the basic question that drives my work.
My first book, Tales of Futures Past: Literature and Anticipation in Contemporary China (Stanford University Press, 2014), explores how normative visions and intimate feelings about the future have shaped literary institutions, editorial practices, and diverse genres and texts (science fiction, children’s literature, translation of foreign literature, experimental fiction, and environmental literature) in socialist and postsocialist China.
My current research interests converge around three themes: the intersections between literature, labor, and social inequality; the ways in which the dichotomy of realism and modernism shapes contemporary Chinese literary historiography; and the use of actual locations in cinema. I am now working on a project on the Shaanxi writer Lu Yao, particularly on the radio broadcasts of his fiction and other media adaptations of his life and work.
I am generally drawn to the moments in which literature and cinema engage the line between fact and fiction, and have an abiding interest in documentary literature and film, especially in works that attempt to account for traumatic experiences and contentious situations or events.
I enjoy translating and am experimenting with different ways to integrate translation in my research and teaching.