|
Judith T. Zeitlin is a professor in Chinese literature and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her areas of interest are Ming-Qing literary and cultural history, with specialties in the classical tale and drama.
She describes her personal interests on her academic page at the University of Chicago as follows:
I’m especially interested in combining literary concerns with other disciplines, such as visual and material culture, medicine, performance, music, and film. I have two books coming out next year, both coming out from the University of Hawaii Press in 2007. The first, called The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature explores the representation of ghosts across the range of literary genres in the late Ming and early Qing, specifically the fantasy of a female corpse revived through love, the imagination of death through a ghostly poetic voice, the mourning of the historical past by the present, and the theatricality of the split between body and soul. The second book is an interdisciplinary volume of essays, co-edited with Charlotte Furth and Ping-chen Hsiung, entitled Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History to which I contributed a piece on the literary self-fashioning of a famous and garrulous sixteenth-century physician named Sun Yikui. I’m currently co-editing another interdisciplinary volume of essays with Joseph Lam, tentatively entitled Musiking the Late Ming, which grew out of a conference we co-organized in May 2006 at the University of Michigan. Two of my current research projects involve tracing the cultural biography of a rare musical instrument as a way to understand the role of things in Chinese literature, and exploring the pleasure quarters as a site of cultural production in music and print.
|
