Kaufman Hall 214
Website: http://pingzhu.oucreate.com
Orchid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9053-4388
Profile
Ping Zhu is an Professor of Modern Chinese Literature in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics. Professor Zhu serves as Acting Editor in Chief of the peer-reviewed journal Chinese Literature and Thought Today and is a contributing editor for World Literature Today. Previously, she served as Acting Editor in Chief of Chinese Literature Today from 2017 to 2021. Ping Zhu is the recipient of the Presidential Dream Course Award in 2015 and the CAS Kinney Sugg Outstanding Professor Award in 2021.
Ping Zhu received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University. Her research interests include modern and contemporary Chinese literature, women’s & gender studies, Chinese films, literary theory, and translation.
Ping Zhu's first book is entitled Gender and Subjectivities in Early Twentieth-century Chinese Literature and Culture (Palgrave, 2015). With firsthand cultural texts and fresh literary analysis, this book explores how Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century rescued the feminine as the inferior other from the colonial sex/gender binary, and reconstructed the feminine as a bisexual quality that both gave birth to and empowered modern Chinese subjectivities.
Ping Zhu has co-edited (with Zhuoyi Wang and Jason McGrath) a volume titled Maoist Laugher (Hong Kong University Press, 2019), which won Choice's Outstanding Academic Title in 2020. The ten essays in this volume examine the social, political, psychological, and aesthetic models of the marriage of laughter and politics during the Mao era from a variety of theoretical perspectives. She has coedited another volume (with Faye Hui Xiao), Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics (Syracuse University Press, 2021), which provides a timely examination of the special characteristics within a diversity of, sometimes clashing, Chinese feminisms.
Ping Zhu is working on a new monograph, tentatively titled “The Cult of Labor in Twentieth-Century China.” It examines the innovative ideas and practices of the modern Chinese who imagined a concept of labor radically different from the abstract concept of labor in capitalist political economy. This humanized, moralized, re-enchanted, sensualized, and sublimated concept of labor is key to understanding Chinese modernity.
Selected Publications
Ping Zhu, “We Are All Laborers: The Identification with Labor During the Chinese New Culture Movement,” forthcoming in The Journal of Asian Studies.
Ping Zhu, “Chinese Exclusion Act and the Late Qing Chinese Cosmopolitanism,” Comparative Literature Studies 58, 4 (2021): 863–890.
Ping Zhu and Hui Faye Xiao, “Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics: An Introduction,” in Ping Zhu and Hui Faye Xiao eds., Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics, 1–36, Syracuse University Press, 2021.
Ping Zhu, “Wang Anyi’s New Shanghai: Gender and Labor in Fu Ping,” in Ping Zhu and Hui Faye Xiao eds. Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics, 216–242, Syracuse University Press, 2021.
Ping Zhu, “From Patricide to Patrilineality: Adapting The Wandering Earth for the Big Screen,” Arts 9, no. 3 (2020): 1–12.
Ping Zhu, “The Study of Laughter in the Mao Era,” in Ping Zhu, Zhuoyi Wang, and Jason McGrath, eds., Maoist Laughter, 1–18, Hong Kong University Press, 2019.
Ping Zhu, “Huajixi, Heteroglossia, and the Maoist Language,” in Ping Zhu, Zhuoyi Wang, and Jason McGrath, eds., Maoist Laughter, 162–178, Hong Kong University Press, 2019.
Ping Zhu, “Women’s Same-Sex Love in Two Fictional Memoirs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” Asian Women 35, no.1 (2019): 71–94.
Education
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. Rutgers University.
M.A. in Chinese and Comparative Literautre. East China Normal University.
B.A. in Chinese Literature. Soochw University.
Teaching Schedule for Fall 2023
MLLL 3763-001 Chinese Cinema, PHSC 222, TR 15:00-16:15
CHIN 4333-001 Translating Chinese, PHSC 120, TR 13:30-14:45
