Xian Wang, Ph.D.

Welcome!

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Notre Dame. I received my Ph.D. degree in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Oregon in 2018. From Fall 2016 to Spring 2017, I held an appointment as a Visiting Instructor of Chinese in the College of East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University. My research and teaching interests encompass Chinese language, modern Chinese literature, film, popular culture, gender and memory studies.

My current book project Flesh and Stone: An Imaginary Museum for Chinese Female Revolutionary Martyrs examines how contested fictional and historical records, stone monuments and artistic representations of female martyrdom formed national memory.
I am also conducting research on a second book project tentatively titled Producing Socialist China: The Aestheticization of Labor in Seventeen-year Literature (1949-1966). It examines the representations of “labor” and “production” in Chinese art and literature of the 1950s and 60s, and explores how the idealization of selfless labor helped to create a new socialist ideology and the new socialist subject.
My third research project on “Propaganda and Counterpropaganda in Popular Culture” is in the beginning stage. When I was conducting research on representations of female revolutionary martyrs, I was drawn to the issues of digital activism, media censorship, and the popular trend of everyday consumers and artists rewriting socialist history and mocking socialist heroes in contemporary China. In my major future project, I plan to pursue this inquiry into contemporary Chinese literature, film and social media, with special focus on the tension between grassroots discourse and official discourse in popular culture.
My research articles have appeared Comparative Literature Studies, Ming Studies, Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, and Modern Fiction Studies. I am the author of the book Creativity in China (2007) which addresses media, art and fashion industries in China.