Chloe Estep

Lecturer, Joseph E Hotung Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Weatherhead East Asia Institute

Educational Background:

AB: Princeton University
MA: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
PhD: Columbia University

Classes Taught:

AHUM UN3400 Colloquium on Modern East Asian Texts
EAAS UN3999 Research in East Asian Studies

Research interests:

Chloe Estep’s research centers on the changing role of the zi, or character, in modern China and its effects on Chinese poetry. Her work explores the zi as a material, visual, and theoretical site which transgresses the boundaries between calligraphic inscription, pictorial representation, modernist symbol, and poetic utterance and where the temporal, aesthetic, and political properties of poetry are articulated. This research shows that not only did changing modes of inscription reveal the traces of classicism in the modern period, but also formed the building blocks of poetic nationalism.

Her article, “’Still holding the pipa to hide half her face’: Visions of Bai Juyi’s ‘Song of the Pipa‘ in Republican China” appears in Nan Nü: Men, Women, and Gender in China 23, no. 1 (2021). Her paper, “Futurist Biopoetics in Republican China” received the Best Graduate Paper prize from the Association for Asian Studies.

She has also published translations of modern Chinese literature and translation theory, including Lu Yao’s 1982 novel Life and “An Exchange on Translation” between Lu Xun and Qu Qiubai, which was included in the most recent edition of The Translation Studies Reader.

Her research has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Program and the Weatherhead East Asia Institute. She earned a PhD in modern Chinese literature from Columbia University in 2021.