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

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.

Professor Wang's second book project, Feminisms and Mainstream Experimental Culture in Modern China: Revisiting Women's Cinema, 1949-1987 (forthcoming from Duke Uiversity Press), re-examines socialist and post-socialist feminisms, mainstream culture, cinematic experimentalism, and women’s cinema in modern China. By re-situating its research subject in global contexts, especially the spread of colonial modernity (1830s-1940s), the intensification of the Cold War (1947–91), and the global rise and advancement of neoliberalism and conservative values (late 1970s and 1980s), and tying them to important transformations in modern Chinese history, the book advocates a geopolitically, socioeconomically, and culturally integrated approach to feminist practice and women’s cinema. It argues that one of the most urgent tasks for contemporary transnational feminism and feminist media studies is to reconnect seemingly “autonomous” subject matters, such as aesthetics, technology, textuality, sex and gender, and individual agency, to the “big pictures” of colonial and neocolonial contexts, sociopolitical environments, global market movements, and transnational media and cultural forces. More specifically, the book attemps to accomplish three tasks. First, to investigate the political implications of the dismissal of socialist feminism and socialist mainstream culture since the late 1970s, and thereby reveal the complicity of seemingly unrelated global forces that seek to erase this critically alternative sociopolitical and cultural practice in modern world history. Second, to critically reexamine a set of important concepts such as socialist feminism, mainstream culture, experimentalism, and women’s cinema in both Chinese and global contexts, providing a situated and transnational new approach to the history and practice of Chinese socialism, feminism, and culture. And third, to study four Chinese female directors as well as their most representative films: Wang Ping and Dong Kena in the 1950s and 1960s, and Zhang Nuanxin and Huang Shuqin in the 1980s and 1990s, exploring Chinese women’s critical role in both forging and diversifying mainstream culture in modern China and their contribution to an alternative re-imagination of future transnational feminism.

 

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.


 

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"Zhang Nuanxin and Social Commitment in 1980s Chinese Women’s Experimental Cinema." Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, vol. 34, no. 3, 2019, 1-29.

"关于中国革命与性别平等／解放的理论再思考“ （Some thoeretical thoughts on Women's Emancipation in Chinese Revoulutionary History)《妇女研究论丛》(Journal of Women Studies), no. 5, 2017, 14-18.

“革命的韵律：跨国女性主义文化研究” (Revolutionary Rhythm: A Study of Transnational Women’s Culture) 《妇女研究论丛》(Journal of Women Studies), no. 2, , 2017, 50-55.

“Chinese Socialist Women’s Cinema: An Alternative Feminist Practice,” in The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender (edited by Kristin Lene Hole, Dijana Jelača, Elizabeth Kaplan, and Patrice Petro) Routledge Press, 2017, pp. 77-87.

《中国性／性别：历史差异》（Chinese Sex/Gender: Historical Differences), (co-editor with Chengzhou He) (Shanghai sanlian, 2016) 

“Wang Anyi” in The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature ed. Denton, Kirk A. (Columbia University Press, 2016), pp. 371-378. 

“Global Chinese Women’s Cinema,” in Film, Television and Theatre Review (《影视戏剧评论》) (Beijing: Chinese Film Press), vol. 1, no. 2, 2016, 86-108. 

重审新时期中国女性主义实践和性/别差异话语（A Critical Review of Chinese Feminism and Sexual/Gender Difference in the New Era), in《南开学报》(Nankai Journal ), no. 6, 2015, 103-118.

“王苹与中国社会主义女性电影：主流女性主义文化、多位主体事件和互嵌性作者身份”（Chinese translation of  “Wang Ping and Women’s Cinema in Socialist China”),  in 《妇女研究论丛》(Journal of Women’s Studies) (Beijing, PR China), no. 4, 2015, 74-88.

“中国社会主义女性主义实践再思考：兼论美国冷战思潮、自由／本质主义对社会主义研究的持续影响” (Chinese Socialist Feminist Practice Reconsidered: A Critical Review of the Persistent Influence of Cold War Ideology and Liberal/Radical Feminism on Socialist Gender Studies), in《妇女研究论丛》(Journal of Women’s Studies) (Beijing, PR China), no. 3, 2015, 5-19.

“Wang Ping and Women’s Cinema in Socialist China: Institutional Practice, Feminist Cultures, and Embedded Authorship.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 40, no. 3, 2015, 589-622.

Other Genders, Other Sexualities: Chinese Differences (guest editor), a special issue of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (Duke University Press, 2013).

《性别与中国电影》(Gender and Chinese Cinema) (co-editor with Chengzhou He) (Nanjing University Press, 2012)

Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts (editor) (Columbia University Press, 2011)

《性别、理论与文化》(Gender, Theory and Culture) (co-editor with Chengzhou He) (Nanjing University Press, 2010)

Years of Sadness (Translation Anthology of Wang Anyi’s Autobiographical Works), (editor and co-translator with Mary Ann O’Donnell) (Cornell East Asian Press, 2009)

Personal Matters: Women's Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth Century China (Stanford University Press, 2004)

 

 

Edith Goldthwaite Miller Faculty Fellow, Pembroke Center, Brown University, 2013-2014

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2010-2011

Edith Goldthwaite Miller Faculty Fellow, Pembroke Center, Brown University, 2006-2007

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

Association for Asian Studies

Society for Cinema and Media Studies