Literature

Guoying Gong

Guoying Gong

Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Heyman Center for the Humanities
Lecturer, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
 
Office: Heyman Center B204
Office Hours: Tuesdays, 3:00–5:00 pm
Email: gg2711@columbia.edu
 
Educational Background
BA: Peking University
MA: Peking University / University of Colorado at Boulder
PhD: Columbia University
 
Classes Taught
AHUM UN1400: Colloquium on Major Texts: East Asia
 
Research Interests

Guoying Gong is a scholar of premodern Chinese literature whose research focuses on medieval Chinese poetry, classical exegesis, and literary thought and criticism. She is currently revising her dissertation into a book manuscript titled Writing Home and Empire from the Margins: Longing and Belonging in Du Fu’s (712–770) Poetry. This project investigates how poetry both reflected and shaped cultural transformation during the pivotal period following the An Lushan Rebellion (755–763), with a focus on Du Fu’s post-rebellion writings composed during his years in exile.

It argues that Du Fu’s literary experimentation was driven by a sustained negotiation of evolving notions of home and newly imagined visions of empire articulated from the margins. By exploring the intersections of poetry with material, infrastructural, and social realms—including geography, transportation, and the circulation of information—the study demonstrates how encounters with unfamiliar landscapes, compromised infrastructure, and disrupted communication on the empire’s peripheries not only shaped Du Fu’s poetic expression but also expanded the formal and conceptual possibilities of the poetic medium, allowing him to re-envision both home and empire.

Lili Xia

Lili Xia

Assistant Professor of Premodern Chinese Literature, Barnard College

Office:  317 Milbank Hall, Barnard College
Office Hours: T 4:10–6:00pm & by appointment

Email:  lxia@barnard.edu

Educational Background

BA: Fudan University

MA: Fudan University

PhD: Princeton University

Classes Taught

AHUM UN1400 Colloquium on Major Texts: East Asia

Research Interests

Lili Xia is a scholar of premodern Chinese literature. Her broader research interests include Sino-steppe interactions, cultural memory, print and book culture, intermediality, and digital humanities.

She is now working on her book project titled “North against South in Middle Period China: Classical Poetry and Literati Culture under Jurchen Jin Rule (1115–1234).” By demonstrating a rival narrative of claiming China in the Sino-Jurchen North against the cultural orthodoxy conceptualized in the Han Chinese-ruled South, the book illustrates the burgeoning literati culture under Jurchen rule, and fleshes out the Jin poetic production in particular. While making full use of Jin literary texts, this book is further enriched by art history and material culture, as well as digital tools of social network and geographic analysis to better represent Jin literati culture on the whole. Her research aims to reveal the heterotopia and heteroglossia of China as an intersubjective, transcultural, and border-crossing space in the Middle Period (800–1400 CE).

Before coming to Barnard, she received her B.A. and M.A. in Classical Chinese Literature at Fudan University, and her Ph.D. in East Asian Studies at Princeton University. She was the 2023–24 Louis Frieberg Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Selected Publications

“Qiuchi as Heterotopia: The Other Space for Su Shi.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 142.1 (2022): 93–119.

Review of Stephen Owen, All Mine! Happiness, Ownership, and Naming in Eleventh-Century China. The Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 85.2 (2022): 325–27.

“Two Narratives of ‘Grand Peace’ in Northern Song Historiography and Cultural Memory of Song Contemporaries” (北宋仁、徽兩朝的“太平敍事”與宋人文化記憶). Zhonghua wenshi luncong (Journal of Chinese Literature and History) 139 (2020): 219–40. (in Chinese)

Tomi Suzuki

Tomi Suzuki

Professor of Japanese Literature, Director of Graduate Studies

Office: 410 Kent Hall
Office Hours: On leave 2025-26
Phone: (212) 854-5034
Email: ts202@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: University of Tokyo (’74)
MA: University of Tokyo (’77)
PhD: Yale University (’88)

Classes Taught

AHUM U3830 Colloquium on Modern East Asian Texts
JPNS GU4008 Readings in Classical Japanese
JPNS GR9020 Graduate Seminar in Modern Japanese Literature

Research Interests

Modern Japanese Literature and Criticism in Comparative Context, Literary and Cultural Theory, Narrative, Genre, and Gender Theory, Modernism and Modernity, Intellectual History of Modern Japan, History of Reading

Professor Suzuki joined the department at Columbia University in 1996. She has published extensively in both the English and Japanese languages.  Currently, Professor Suzuki is completing a book entitled Gender, Literary Culture, and Nation in Japan: 1880s-1950s, which investigates the formation of the literary field from the late nineteenth century to the postwar period in relationship to gender construction, language reform, and education. It explores the modernist construction and questioning of Japanese linguistic and cultural traditions in a transnational context. Most recently, she co-edited The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature.

Selected Publications

The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature (co-editor, Cambridge, 2016).

“Translations and Modern Japanese Literature: Re-reading Mori Ogai’s Maihime at Columbia University,” Bungaku (2014, in Japanese)

“Transformations and Continuities: Censorship and Occupation-Period Criticism,” in Occupation-period Literary Journals: 1946–1947, vol. 2 (Iwanami Shoten, 2010, in Japanese)

Censorship, Media, and Literary Culture in Japan (author and co-editor, Shin’yōsha, 2012)

Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature (author and co-editor, Stanford University, 2001)

Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford, 1996)