Within Georgetown's Chinese program I regularly teach courses on pre-modern Chinese literature and Classical Chinese language, as well as the Chinese Senior Seminar and the introductory East Asia: Texts and Contexts course for new Chinese and Japanese majors. Occasionally I also teach an upper-level modern Chinese reading course. I also serve as the study abroad advisor for Chinese.
In addition to my "Introduction to Chinese Literature," I offer two reading courses in Classical Chinese. "Chinese Literary Dream Texts" explores Classical Chinese texts that recount or interpret dreams, that explain the origins of dreams, or that use dreams as a literary framing device. My other Classical reading course centers on tales of the strange and marvelous. I also regularly offer two courses with readings in translation. "War and its Legacies in Chinese Literature" uses texts in English translation to trace the history of Chinese portrayals of warfare, soldiers, civilian suffering, the dead, and the moral implications of military conflict. "Reading Chinese Landscapes" explores Chinese landscape painting, landscape poetry, and travel essays, using English language materials.
People often wonder how I came to this. As a college English major it occurred to me that the field of English literature would scarcely notice my departure, whereas if I just learned Chinese (how hard could it be?) I would have access to a mind-bogglingly vast and rich literary tradition about which relatively little had been written in English and which would force me to rethink all my assumptions about what literature is. So I started taking Chinese right after graduation, found I was reasonably good at it, went on to graduate school, spent a couple of years in Taipei, taught for a while at Grinnell College and Wellesley College, and have been on the faculty here at Georgetown since 1997.
My book, In Limpid Dream: Nostalgia and Zhang Dai's Reminiscences of the Ming (EastBridge, 2007), concerns Classical Chinese essays in which a certain profligate Shaoxing literatus named Zhang Dai (1597-1684?) seeks to capture in a series of nostalgic prose fragments the charmed life he led before the Ming dynasty fell to the Manchus in 1644. I am always interested in how people create personas for themselves by describing remembered fragments of the places where they have lived.
My current book project explores the links between self, personal memory, and public memory, by focusing on the structures that house memory in late-imperial Chinese memoir texts. The first section examines the relationship between architecture and memory in recollections of youth. The section I am working on now looks at an elaborate miscellany (biji) by the sixteenth-century official and author Zhang Han. Written in his retirement after a long official career, Zhang's book begins geographically, following Zhang's postings in the four quarters of the empire; it then spirals down through intermediate categories (craftsmen and merchants, flora and fauna), all the way to unusual things heard, and dreams while sleeping. I am looking at it as a particularly clear attempt by one author to locate himself and his personal perception within a large and complex known world–or alternatively, to build a comprehensive world structure from the point of view of a self's experience. I have a back-burner project collecting late imperial first-person accounts of dreams in order to explore how the personal experience of dream intersected with the prevailing notions of dream interpretation, of dream as path to parallel realms of existence, and with the late-imperial obsession with dream as structuring literary device.
Most of my hobbies have to do with amateur music-making. At various times I have been a kid pianist, a fifer, an community orchestra clarinetist, an ensemble singer (in a glee club, early music ensembles, and a choir specializing in Latin American music), and very briefly a choir conductor. I seem to collect simple woodwind instruments (fife, recorder, pennywhistle, dizi, bawu, xiao, hulusi, six-hole irish flute, various ocarinas), some of which I can play. I am trying to work up my piano skills again. And I am also fond of hiking in the woods and bringing back intriguing natural wonders in my coat pockets.
Academic Appointment(s)
- Primary
- Associate Professor, College - Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures