Professor of Chinese Literature, Harvard University
Xiaofei Tian received her BA from Beijing University in 1989 and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University in 1998. Her research interests include Chinese literature and culture, manuscript culture, book history, the history of ideas, and world literature. Her major research field is the literature, social history and cultural history of early medieval China. She has also published and taught courses on classical vernacular fiction, the literature of the Republican era, the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), and contemporary Chinese literary and cultural issues.
She is the author of Tao Yuanming and Manuscript Culture: The Record of a Dusty Table (2005) and Beacon Fire and Shooting Star: The Literary Culture of the Liang (502-557) (2007). Her Chinese publications include a book on the sixteenth-century novel The Plum in the Golden Vase, a book on Sappho, a book on the Moorish Spain, a book of essays on premodern and modern Chinese literature and culture, and several works of translation. She is also a writer who published several collections of poetry and essays.
Her new book, Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-century China, is forthcoming from Harvard University Asia Center Press.
She is currently working on a book manuscript on nostalgia for the Three Kingdoms period, as well as a study and translation of a late nineteenth-century manuscript on the traumatic childhood memory of the Taiping Rebellion.
