Biography
My work is situated at the intersection of Early Modern Chinese literary studies, philosophy, and anthropology. I am primarily interested in the Journey to the West story complex, including the great Ming novel and a number of dramatic texts originally performed in seasonal festivals. I aim to locate these texts within a history of the imagination in China—tracing how their authors drew from and transformed techniques for visionary journeying from diverse traditions of poetic, meditative, and ritual practice. Through this, I hope to explore how Early Modern literary forms enacted novel interactions between mind and world.
I am also interested in Chinese poetics, music theory, and ecological thought, as well as the history of Chinese-Indian literary exchange.
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.