Professor Lingzhen Wang's areas of expertise include modern Chinese literature and culture, women's cinema, critical theory and transnational feminist and media studies.

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 commodificationand 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.
 

In her second book, Revisiting Women’s Cinema,  Wang ponders the roots of contemporary feminist stagnation and the limits of both commercial mainstream and elite minor cultures by turning to socialist women filmmakers in modern China. She illustrates their sociopolitical engagements, critical interventions, and popular artistic experiments, offering a revised conception of socialist feminism, post-Mao indepedent feminism, mainstream culture, and women’s cinema. Her study of Chinese female film directors from the 1950s to the 1990s also unveils how they have been profoundly misread through extant research paradigms entrenched in Western Cold War ideology, late second-wave cultural feminism, and post-Mao intellectual discourses. She calls for a critical reevaluation of historical materialism, socialist feminism, and popular culture to forge an integrated emancipatory vision for future transnational feminist and cultural practices.

 

Her other research and writing projects include translations of Chinese women writers into English, a study of feminism and consmopolitics in the modern world,  and a re-examination of the legacy of socialist feminism.


 

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Distinguished IWLC Visiting Professor, Tsinghua University, China

Edith Goldthwaite Miller Faculty Fellow, Pembroke Center, Brown University

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship

International Research Fellowship at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, John Hopkins University

Bunting Fellowship, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University

Faculty Research Fellowship, the Pembroke Center, Brown University

Association for Asian Studies

Society for Cinema and Media Studies