In July 2023, I joined the Department of East Asian Studies at McGill University (Montreal, Canada) as associate professor. Currently I hold the Richard Charles & Esther Yewpick Lee Chair in Chinese Cultural Studies in my home department at McGill.

My first academic job was with the Asian Studies Department at Vanderbilt University, where I was assistant professor of Asian Studies from 2015 to 2022 and associate professor with tenure between 2022 and 2023.

A Luce Foundation/ACLS Early Career Fellowship (then titled Postdoc Fellowship) in China studies allowed me to take a year of research leave during 2017-18.

In my capacity as a literary historian, I have served on the Executive Committee of the Ming and Qing Chinese Forum at the Modern Language Association, the Program Committee for the Association for Asian Studies Annal Conferences (2022-24), and currently I’m the president of the Society for Ming Studies.

Prior to that, I studied Chinese literature at Yale University and in Beijing China. Still earlier, I spent my childhood in a small village in north China and regularly wondered what would exist beyond the mountains that surrounded the village.

Academic background: 

• B.A., Chinese Literature, Beijing Normal University, 2006
• M.A., Classical Chinese Philology, Beijing Normal University, 2009
• Ph.D., Chinese Literature, Yale University, 2015

Picture: My hometown village named The Little Ice Valley in North China.