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)