Lingzhen Wang
Associate Professor of East Asian Studies:
East Asian Studies
Phone: +1 401 863 7092
Lingzhen_Wang@Brown.EDU
Professor Lingzhen Wang's areas of expertise include modern Chinese literature and culture, Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, and Chinese cinema.
Biography
Lingzhen Wang received her B.A. and M.A. from Nanjing University, P.R. China. She came to the United States as a visiting fellow at Harvard University and earned her Ph.D. in East Asian Literature from Cornell University. She joined the Department of East Asian Studies at Brown in 1998.
Interests
Professor Lingzhen Wang's areas of expertise include modern Chinese literature and culture, Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, and Chinese cinema. Her first major research project centers on Chinese women's life and writing in the long, turbulent twentieth century. Her book, Personal Matters: Women's Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004) studies a group of both well known and lesser-known Chinese women writers in relation to dominant discourses of Chinese modernity—nationalism, revolution, socialism, and market commodification—and emphasizes aspects of women's experience, especially their subjective, emotional, psychic, and bodily activities, that tend to be dismissed in mainstream studies of history and literature. The book reconfigures Chinese women's autobiographical writing as an important means of self-negotiation and re-theorizes the concept of the personal in feminist and literary criticism.
Professor Wang's second book project, Women Directing Films: History, Cinematic Authorship, and Feminisms in Modern China, focuses on gender and Chinese visual modernity, examining particularly the role of female film directors in constructing mainstream Chinese cinema and/or negotiating gendered and different spaces in the second half of the twentieth century. With emphatic attention to social and historical conditions and transformations in modern China, the project also critically reexamines existing feminist theories of gender and cinema, questioning and revising the prevalent Western feminist approaches to women directors and visual culture that are based on binary models of "sexual difference." She has published several articles on the following female film directors: Dong Kena, Huang Shuqin, Zhang Nuanxin, Hu Mei, and Ma Xiaoying.
Her other research and writing projects include translations of Chinese women writers into English, a study of transnational feminism in the contemporary globalized world, and a critical re-examination of the socialist legacy on gender, politics, and identity formation.
Prof. Wang's current project is titled Women Directing Films: History, Cinematic Authorship, and Feminisms in Modern China
Degrees
B.A. Nanjing University, M.A. Nanjing University, Ph. D. Cornell University
Awards
Edith Goldthwaite Miller Faculty Fellow, Pembroke Center, Brown University, 2006-2007
Research Project Grant Award, Wesleyan University (declined), 2005
International Research Fellowship at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, John Hopkins University, 2004.
First Recipient of Wendy J. Strothman Faculty Research Award in the Humanities, Brown University, 2002-03.
Bunting Fellowship, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, 2001-02
Salomon Faculty Research Awards, Brown University, 2000-01
Faculty Research Fellowship, Pembroke Center, Brown University, 1999
Affiliations
Association for Asian Studies
Funded Research
N/A