Faculty & Staff

Faculty

Judith Zeitlin

Judith T. Zeitlin, Ph.D.

Professor in Chinese Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations.

 

E-mail: j-zeitlin@uchicago.edu

Teaching/Research Interests:

Ming-Qing literary and cultural history, with specialties in the classical tale and drama.  

I’m especially interested in combining literary concerns with other disciplines, such as visual and material culture, music, performance, medicine and film. Two recent books of mine came 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. Of late I am most interested in music and its relation to material culture and the pleasure quarters during the late Ming and Qing. An article tracing the cultural biography of a rare type of stringed instrument called a “Hulei” and another on the musical text in seventeenth-century drama and songbooks are coming out next year.  I am also continuing to work on ghosts in other media—I’ve contributed an article to an exhibition catalogue on the eighteenth-century painter Luo Ping’s famous Ghost Amusement handscroll for a retrospective of the artist opening in Zurich in spring 2009 and then traveling to the Metropolitan Museum in New York;  I’m working on a paper on a Chinese ghost opera film made in 1958 for a symposium I’m on Chinese opera film after 1949 that I’m co-organizing with Paola Iovene in Chicago in April 2009. 

Selected Publications:

Books

The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature (University of Hawai’i, 2007)

Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History, co-edited with Charlotte Furth and Ping-chen Hsiung (University of Hawai’i, 2007)

Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale (Stanford, 1993)

Writing and Materiality in China, co-edited with Lydia Liu (Harvard, 2003)

Articles

“The Gift of Song: Courtesans and Patrons in late Ming and early Qing Cultural Production.” In Hsiang Lectures on Chinese Poetry, ed. Grace Fong. McGill University: Centre for East Asian Research, (2008).

“’Notes of Flesh’: The Courtesan’s Song in Seventeenth-Century China” in The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon  (2006)

 “Music and Performance in Palace of Lasting Life” in Trauma and Transcendence in Chinese Literature, ed. Idema, Li, and Widmer (2006)

“The Life and Death of the Image: Ghosts and Portraits in Chinese Literature” in Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture, ed. Wu Hung and Katherine Tsiang (Harvard, 2005)

 “Xiaoshuo” in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti (2006)

 “Shared Dreams: The Story of the Three Wives’ Commentary on The Peony Pavilion” (1994)

Selected articles in Chinese by Cai Jiudi:

“Chongshen yu fenshen: Mingmo Zhongguo xiqu zhong de ‘hun dan.’ [Doubling and Splitting the Phantom Heroine in Seventeenth-Century Drama] In Tang Xianzu yu Mudanting yanjiu [Research on Tang Xianzu and Peony Pavilion], ed. Hua Wei (Taipei, 2006)

 “Tibishi yu Ming Qing zhi ji dui funü shi di shouji” [Writing on Walls and the Collection of Women’s Poetry in the Late Ming and Early Qing.]  In Ming Qing wenxue yu xingbie yanjiu [Ming Qing Literature and Gender, ed. Zhang Hongsheng, (Nanjing, 2002)

Courses to be taught 2008-2009

Courses taught 2006-2007

Courses Taught 2005-2006