We would be delighted to include more profiles of our alumni, whether recent or longer ago, on this page. If you would like to be featured, please submit your profile from the Submit Your Alumni Profile button on the right or contact dalc@colorado.edu. Here is a full list of the more than eighty graduates of the Chinese MA program who have gone on to doctoral study since 1991.
Yafang BAO
Yafang BAO (MA CU Boulder, 2014) is currently a PhD student at Stanford University. She specializes in poetry and literati culture in Song China, and also has training in Chinese calligraphy and art history.
Baiqian BIAN
Baiqian BIAN received her MA in Chinese Literature from CU Boulder in 2018. She is currently a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her research interests include medieval Chinese literature and intellectual history.
Daniel BURTON-ROSE
Dr. Daniel Burton-Rose is an Assistant Professor of History at Wenzhou-Kean University. Dr. Burton-Rose obtained his doctorate from the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University in 2016. He is the co-editor, with David A. Bello, of the anthology Insect Histories of East Asia (University of Washington Press 2023) and the author of Conversing with Spirits: Prophecy and Spirit-Writing in Qing Conquest China, which is the first of several planned volumes exploring the role of communication between mortals and spirits in the self-representations of powerful families in the Yangzi Delta region in late imperial China. He serves as the Senior Editor of the journal Asian Medicine: Journal of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Medicine (Brill), for which he co-edited a special issue with Yi-Li Wu titled “African American Contributions to American Acupuncture,” and has contributed to a range of peer-reviewed scholarly journals, including Daoism: Religion, History and Society, Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies, Journal of the History of Biology, Journal on Religion and Violence, Korean Journal for the History of Science, and T’oung Pao. View his work.
Graham CHAMNESS
Graham CHAMNESS graduated with an MA in Chinese literature from CU Boulder in 2010, after taking his BA in Classics also from CU (2007). He is now a PhD candidate focusing on early medieval Chinese literature and culture at Harvard University. His dissertation examines the literature produced at elite social gatherings and accounts of those gatherings in late third- through early fifth-century southern China. He is broadly interested in the way poetry is used at social gatherings to create cultural communities in an imagined space outside the imperial court at different junctures in pre-modern China.
Ruby Wai Yee CHAN
Ruby Wai Yee CHAN is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. Prior to joining Princeton, she earned her M.A. degree from University of Colorado Boulder in 2021, and a B.A. degree from Hong Kong Baptist University in 2017. She is primarily interested in medieval Chinese literature and its reception history through the lens of anthologies in late imperial China. Her research interests also include the history and materiality of books as well as the canonization of text in China.
rubywychan@princeton.edu
https://eas.princeton.edu/people/ruby-wai-yee-chan
Timothy Wai Keung CHAN
Timothy Wai Keung CHAN graduated in May 1999 from CU Boulder with a PhD from EALC and CompLit. He taught at Ohio State University and the University of Sydney before joining Hong Kong Baptist University in 2006.
Fletcher COLEMAN
Fletcher COLEMAN is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Texas, Arlington. He received his MA from CU Boulder in 2013 and a PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University in 2020. Coleman is a specialist on the art historiography and religious arts of China, and his research spans the early medieval through modern periods. His current project examines the antiquarian conventions and pedagogical practices utilized by American scholars in the creation of East Asian art history as an academic discipline. Focusing on plaster cast collecting and ink rubbing connoisseurship, he argues that the intersection of these traditions became a foundation for early museum restoration practices and the teaching of East Asian art in America. Taking the Buddhist caves of Longmen as his primary case study, Coleman explores how this synthesis of traditions became physically embedded in objects during the study, removal, and restoration of sculpture from the site.
Prior to arriving at the University of Texas, Arlington, Coleman was a Visiting Professor of Art History at the University of Notre Dame and Indiana University, Bloomington. Coleman has held fellowships at a variety of institutions across the United States and Asia; including, the Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Studies, Kyoto, and the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou. He has also served in the Asia-Mediterranean division of the Harvard Art Museums, as well as the Houghton Rare Books Library.
fletcher.coleman@uta.edu
https://mentis.uta.edu/explore/profile/fletcher-coleman
Timothy DAVIS
Timothy DAVIS received his MA in pre-modern Chinese literature from CU Bolder in 1999 and his PhD from Columbia University in 2008. He is the Asian Studies Librarian at Brigham Young University and a scholar of the social, cultural, and literary history of medieval China. His book Entombed Epigraphy and Commemorative Culture in Early Medieval China (Brill, 2015) is the first monograph in English on the religious and social functions of early muzhiming (“entombed epitaph inscriptions”).
Heng DU
Heng DU received her M.A. in Chinese literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2010 after writing a thesis on the “Chu shuo” chapters of the Hanfeizi under the direction of Professor Matthias Richter. She went on to receive a Ph.D. degree in Chinese History from Harvard University in 2018. Heng is currently an assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. Her book project, provisionally entitled The Author’s Two Bodies in Early Chinese Textual Culture, expands the concept of “paratext" so that it can serve as an analytical tool for the study of early authorship and textual identity. For her future research, she is interested in the comparative study of book cultures in the ancient world.
Kay DUFFY
Kay DUFFY received her MA from CU Boulder in 2012 and PhD in East Asian Studies from Princeton University in 2019. She is an Assistant Professor of Premodern Sinitic Poetry at the University of British Columbia, and her research interests include the poetics, historiographies, and court cultures of the sinographic sphere.
Jon FELT
Jon FELT completed his MA at CU Boulder in 2008, and then his PhD from Stanford University in 2014. After two years as an assistant professor at Virginia Tech, he is now an assistant professor at Brigham Young University. His research is on Six Dynasties history, especially historical geography and the history of geographical thought.
Chi FENG
Chi FENG is a doctoral student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington. She received her B. Phil. in Philosophy from Tongji University in 2019, MA in Chinese from Boulder in 2022, nad MA in Religious Studies from Boulder in 2022. Her research covers a wide range of early Chinese texts and thought. She is particularly interested in early philosophy on music and ritual, early texts with performative features such as ritual lyrics, and well as inscriptions and usage of excavated musical instruments. She is also pursuing a PhD minor in music theory in Jacobs School of Music.
Scott GALER
Scott GALER (MA CU Boulder, 1995; PhD University of Wisconsin, 2003) spent the first ten years of his full-time academic career teaching a broad range of undergraduate courses in Chinese language (beginning to advanced), literature, culture, and an interdisciplinary course on globalization and the developing world. Though his heart is in the classroom, he has spent the better part of his second decade at BYU-Idaho as a department chair, dean, and now as an associate academic vice president. When not on campus, Scott enjoys traveling and spending time with his family.
Guanrui GONG
Guanrui GONG is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. She earned her M.A. degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2022. She is interested in exploring the negotiations between the humans and the environment in medieval Chinese literature.
Guoying GONG
Guoying GONG (MA CU Boulder, 2017) is currently a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. Her research interests include medieval Chinese poetry, literary thought and criticism, and intellectual history.
Yue HONG
HONG Yue is associate professor of premodern Chinese literature at Renmin University. After graduating from CU Boulder with a master degree in 2002, she received her PhD from Harvard University in 2010. She taught at Kalamazoo College before joining Renmin University in 2018. Her research area is medieval Chinese literature and culture.
Kangni HUANG
Kangni HUANG received her MA in Chinese Literature from CU Boulder in 2018. She is currently a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Kangni studies late imperial Chinese literature--Ming-Qing fiction in particular--and its intersection with other socio-cultural spheres, such as historiography, popular religion, materiality, and print culture. She is also interested in exploring comparative approaches to Ming-Qing literature within the context of a global early modern era.
Jinhua JIA
JIA Jinhua received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1999. She is now Professor of Chinese Culture at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She has worked as Research Associate and Visiting Faculty at Harvard Divinity School (2005-06), Fellow at the National Humanities Center (2014), and Member at Institute for Advanced Study (2015). Her research interests include early to medieval Chinese literature, religion, thought, and gender studies. She has published more than ten books and many articles in both English and Chinese.
https://www.polyu.edu.hk/cc/en/people/academic-staff/prof-jia-jinhua
Qian JIA
Qian JIA (MA CU Boulder, 2016) is currently a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University. Her research focuses on medieval Chinese poetry, changes in poetic conventions and aesthetics, and the relationship between individuality and literary tradition.
Stephan N. KORY
After graduating from CU with an MA in Chinese in 1998, Stephan N. KORY joined the JET Program, stayed in Japan for almost four years, and spent a semester at Southwest Communications University in Sichuan teaching with his partner. He then joined the PhD Program in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, graduated in 2012, and has held teaching positions at Reed College, Swarthmore College, and the College of Charleston. He also spent a little over a year as a visiting fellow at the IKGF at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany. In 2019, he was hired as an Assistant Professor of Chinese at the University of Florida, where he teaches courses on Chinese language, literature, and culture.
Amy LANTRIP
Amy LANTRIP graduated from the ALC department in 2019, and is now a PhD student in the East Asian Studies Department at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on satire, humor, and science fiction in early modern and modern Chinese literature. She is particularly interested in parody of gender and religion, as well as the popularity and censorship of comedy.
Crismon LEWIS
Crismon LEWIS (M.A. CU Boulder, 2018) is a doctoral student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. He is mainly interested in the composition and collation of transmitted and excavated manuscript texts from early China.
Sijia LI
After receiving her M.A. in Premodern Chinese Literature from CU Boulder in 2022, Sijia LI is currently a Ph. D. student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University. Her research interests include medieval Chinese literature, manuscript studies, print culture, and premodern Sino-Japanese interactions.
Jianmei LIU
LIU Jianmei (MA CU Boulder, 1992) obtained her doctorate in East Asian Studies from Columbia University in 1998, and is currently Professor in the Division of the Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She is the author of a number of Chinese-language academic and literary publications. Her academic books in English include Zhuangzi and Modern Chinese Literature (2016), Revolution Plus Love: Literary History, Women's Bodies, and Thematic Repetition in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction (2003), and The Jin Yong Phenomenon: Chinese Martial Arts Fiction and Modern Chinese Literary History (2007, co-edited with Ann Huss). Her areas of interest are modern and contemporary Chinese literature, gender studies, the relationship between philosophy and literature, and film studies.
http://www.huma.ust.hk/cgi-bin/people/people_index.php?action=view&type=F&profile_id=237
Ying LIU
Ying LIU (MA CU Boulder, 2010) received her PhD from the University of California Irvine in 2016. She is assistant professor of Chinese at Earlham College. She also has taught at Kenyon College. Her research interests include modern and contemporary Chinese literature, cinema, and popular culture, with a focus on youth narratives and representations of young people. In addition to courses in Chinese language, she also offers courses in her major area of expertise, film and contemporary Chinese society and youth in Chinese culture.
Michelle LOW
Michelle LOW (MA 1998; PhD CompLit 2006, both at CU Boulder) is Associate Professor of Chinese and Asian Studies at the University of Northern Colorado, where she continues to teach Chinese language and literature from elementary through advanced modern Chinese language courses, classical Chinese courses, and courses in Chinese literature, philosophy, and civilizations in English. She directs the Chinese language, Asian Studies, and Chinese teacher-education programs at UNC, and focuses on undergraduate education. She regularly leads students on short-term study abroad programs to China.
Xiaoyue LUO
Xiaoyue LUO received her MA degree in premodern Chinese literature from CU Boulder in 2023. Now, she is a PhD student in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. Her research interests include late imperial Chinese literature, print culture, ethnic albums, strange tales, and mainland Southeast Asia’s contact with China.
Yiyi LUO
Yiyi Luo earned degrees from the University of Colorado-Boulder (MA) and Princeton University (PhD). Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in the School of Literature at Capital Normal University. She researches medieval Chinese literature, culture, and religion, with a primary focus on early medieval Chinese poetry. She is also interested in the interaction between the literary and religious communities during the medieval period.
Yiyi’s forthcoming book, tentatively titled Contesting Nostalgia: Polyvocality in the Poetry of Yu Xin (513-581 CE), investigates the ways in which Yu Xin’s writings gives rise to a diverse body of poetic voices, yet how one specific authorial image of him was chosen and became dominant in later ages. Her other research projects include studies of the rhetorical tradition of reclusion in medieval poetry and prose, of political messages in Yu Xin’s Daoist poetry, and of the active role played by scholar-officials of the Tang dynasty in preserving and shaping literature of the “Southern Dynasties.”
luo.allie@gmail.com
https://cnu-cn.academia.edu/YiyiLuo%E7%BE%85%E5%A5%95%E5%A5%95
Tom MAZANEC
Tom MAZANEC is assistant professor of premodern Chinese literature and cultural studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After attaining an MA from CU Boulder in 2011 with an emphasis in Chinese and comparative literature, he went on to earn his PhD from Princeton University in 2017. His main area of expertise is medieval Chinese poetry and religion. Other research interests include translation, poetics, digital humanities, and world literature.
Zhujun MA
Zhujun MA is currently a PhD student in Religious Studies at Brown University. She earned her Dual MA in Religious Studies and Asian Languages & Civilizations from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2022. Her research interests mainly focus on religions, gender, pilgrimage, vernacular practices, and print culture in Late Imperial China.
Xiaojing MIAO
Xiaojing MIAO graduated with her doctorate from CU Boulder in May 2019 and is now the Stanley Ho Junior Research Fellow in Chinese at Pembroke College, University of Oxford. Her primary research focus is medieval Chinese literature and culture (roughly 100 to 900 CE), with secondary focuses on rhetoric, historiography, and humor studies. Currently, she is working on her first book manuscript, tentatively titled Mirrors and Masks: Showing Selves in Tang Literature (618-766), which explores Tang literati’s self-representation.
Travis MYERS
Travis MYERS completed his MA in Chinese Literature at CU Boulder in 2021. He is currently a PhD student in the Department of Theology at Saint Louis University. His research interests include early Chinese thought, Christian theology, and comparative religions and theology.
John O’LEARY
John O’LEARY (MA CU Boulder, 2017) is currently a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. His research focuses on canon formation, commentarial traditions, and the development of cultural identity in the early imperial period.
Jonathan PETTIT
Jonathan PETTIT came to Boulder in 2001 and studied Tang poetry and Daoism. After his graduation in 2004 he went on to Indiana University where he received a dual doctoral degree in Chinese Literature and Religious Studies in 2013. Currently, he is assistant professor of Chinese Religions at the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa. His research projects focus on the circulation of Daoist scriptures in medieval and late imperial China. At UHM, Jonathan teaches courses on Chinese religions and Daoist literature. He also leads regular study abroad tours in Taiwan, China, and Greater Tibet. In addition, he is the book review editor for Review on Religion and Chinese Society.
Xiao RAO
Xiao RAO (MA CU Boulder, 2013) is currently an Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. In 2019, he received his PhD from Stanford University with a specialization in premodern Chinese literature. His research interests include literary history, religion, and literati culture in medieval China, cultural studies of laughter, and premodern Chinese storytelling.
Ann RODDY
Ann RODDY had more than twenty years’ experience studying Chinese and working as cultural consultant and interpreter for international cultural and business ventures throughout China when she graduated from CU Boulder in 2016. She went on to pursue an MLIS degree from Simmons University and became the first Library Director and Asian Collections Curator at the Elling Eide Research Center. Since 2020 she is Head of the China Section in the Asian and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress. Ann is a prolific writer, painter and poet.
Dominic TOSCANO
Dominic TOSCANO (M.A. CU Boulder, 2016; Ph.D. Harvard University, 2022) is Assistant Professor of Chinese at Oberlin College. He is currently at work on his first book, an exploration of the crucial few extant contemporary poetry anthologies from the Tang dynasty, which offer us a fascinating window onto the tastes and values of writers living during this oft-mythologized period. His scholarly interests lie mainly in the literary, intellectual, and social history of early and medieval China, though he also maintains an abiding interest in religious studies, the classical traditions of the West, and the literature and history of England during the Middle Ages and Reformation.
Robin VISSER
Robin VISSER (MA CU Boulder, 1994) obtained her doctorate in Chinese literature from Columbia University in 2000, and is Associate Professor of Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has translated and published numerous articles on Chinese and Taiwanese literature, urban cultural studies, women’s studies, and cinema. Her first book, Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China (Duke UP, 2010), analyzes Chinese urban planning, architecture, fiction, cinema, art and cultural studies at the turn of the twenty-first century. She is Chief Co-editor of the Chinese-language Journal of East Asian Humanities (Dongya renwen 東亞人文), editorial board member for Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, and recipient of a 2017–18 National Humanities Center fellowship for research on Sinophone eco-literature.
Gang WANG
WANG Gang (Richard G. Wang) (MA CU Boulder, 1993; PhD University of Chicago, 1999) taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Swarthmore College. Currently, he is associate professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Florida. His areas of interest are Daoism, fiction, and religion and Chinese literature of late imperial China, especially Daoism and local society in the Ming as well as the religious dimensions of Ming novels. He is the author of Maoshan zhi [Maoshan gazetteer] (2016), The Ming Prince and Daoism: Institutional Patronage of an Elite (2012), The Ming Erotic Novella: Genre, Consumption, and Religiosity in Cultural Practice (2012), and Religion and State in Local Society in Late Imperial and Modern China (in Chinese, co-edited with Li Tiangang, 2007).
http://languages.ufl.edu/people/faculty-alpha/richard-g-wang/
Ping WANG
WANG Ping (PhD, University of Washington, 2006; MA CU Boulder, 2000) specializes in classical Chinese literature and culture. She has published books and articles on early medieval court culture, literary production, and intellectual trends in the large geographical area that we now call China. Before coming to the University of Washington, Seattle, Ping taught at Princeton University and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Huizhi WANG
Huizhi WANG received her MA degree from CU Boulder in 2022. Now she is a PhD student in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her academic interests lie in premodern Chinese literature and culture, especially the interrelations between literature and Buddhism during the medieval period.
Wenfei WANG
Wenfei WANG is currently a PhD student of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She studies the literature, and visual culture of early modern (Ming and Qing) China with a special interest in the questions of transmediality, and epistemology in response to the problematics of modernity. Wenfei holds a B. A. in Chinese Literature (2012), and an M. A. in Film Studies from Nanjing University (2015), and a second M. A. in Chinese Literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder (2020). She used to work as a curator, translator, and art critic of contemporary Chinese art in Beijing.
Yanning WANG
Dr. Yanning WANG graduated from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2003 with an MA degree in Comparative Literature with a concentration in Chinese literature. While at CU, she also worked as a teaching assistant for Chinese language courses of various levels. She then completed her PhD degree at Washington University in St. Louis. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Chinese at Florida State University.
Xiaobin YANG
YANG Xiaobin (MA CU Boulder, 1991) is a poet, critic and graphic artist. He is the author of nine volumes of poetry in Chinese and a number of critical/scholarly works, including The Chinese Postmodern (University of Michigan Press, 2002). Having earned his PhD at Yale University and taught at the University of Mississippi, Yang Xiaobin is now Research Professor at Academia Sinica (Taiwan).
Zhuming YAO
Zhuming YAO (MA CU Boulder, 2016) works primarily on early Chinese literature, with particular interests in the composition, transmission, and reception of early and early medieval texts, both transmitted and archeologically excavated. He is also interested in comparative antiquity, and works regularly with classicists on poetics and historiography.
http://www.princeton.edu/eas/graduate/current/zhuming-yao/index.xml
Sarah ZANOLINI
Sarah ZANOLINI has been practicing traditional East Asian medicine since 2012. She received her M.A. from the ALC department in 2018, after completing a thesis under the supervision of Professor Terry Kleeman that examined paired medical manuscripts from Dunhuang. She is currently a PhD student in the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on Chinese Medicine, including geographic determinants of health, the relationship between diet and healing, and popular medical remedies in late imperial China.
Leting ZHENG
Leting ZHENG (M.A. CU Boulder, 2020) is currently a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at University of Oregon. Her research interests include Chinese children’s literature and history in the early 20th century, and Cantonese studies.
Yaling ZHOU
Yaling ZHOU (M.A. CU Boulder, 2019) is a PhD student in Philosophy at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. In her research she aims to make the methods of New Historicism productive for the study of philosophical texts from the Warring States period. In particular she is asking how historical conditions possibly directed the way intellectual history was developed and reconstructed in early China.
Xi ZHU
Xi ZHU received his MA degree in Chinese from CU Boulder in May 2013. Currently he is a PhD student in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington. His research focuses on early China, with particular interests in manuscript studies, textual criticism, writing system, and historical phonology.