Biography
I work on the history of vernacular story cycles in late medieval and early modern China. My research focuses on the generative tension between the particular and the universal—how stories that began their life as part of larger worlds (the communal cycles of festivals, the rhythms of ritual practice, or more generally the forms of everyday life) were refashioned into long narratives that claimed to be themselves complete, self-contained worlds. I am interested in how these works often fell short of their totalizing ambitions and were dismantled and reintegrated into local contexts in novel ways. Central to my research is the great Ming prose narrative Xiyouji and various minor texts in its story tradition that present alternative versions of events and often open expressive possibilities absent in the full-length work.
I graduated from UC Berkeley in 2020 with degrees in Chinese and anthropology. For my honors thesis, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Liangshan, Sichuan on ethnic relations, rural development, and frontier military history. I have also studied Chinese literature and history at Harvard University and Taiwan National University.