Ye Yuan

MA Program Director, Lecturer in Discipline

Office Hours: W 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Office: 704 Uris Hall
Email: yy2402@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: Columbia University
MA: Columbia University
BA: East China Normal University

Classes Taught

Research Interests

Ye Yuan’s research takes Sinitic literature as a nexus that brings political, intellectual, social, and cultural factors together, to further deepen the understanding of Sinitic literature as the field that connects different locales and transcends the boundary of pre-modern and modern. Her current book project seeks to understand how colloquial Chinese language and literature were conceptualized and practiced in early modern East Asia—a region with shared texts and cultures based on literary Sinitic. Based on her dissertation “Contemporary Spoken Chinese in Eighteenth-Century Japan: Language Learning, Fiction Writing, and Vocality,” this book project explores the learning of contemporary spoken Chinese and writing in colloquial Chinese in early modern Japan. It is an inquiry into the early modern East Asian understanding of “language” before the Western, phonocentric view became dominant.

Selected Publications

“Speaking the Sinitic: Translation and ‘Chinese Language’ in Eighteenth-Century Japan.” In Ecologies of Translation in East and South East Asia, 1600-1900, edited by Guo Li, Patricia Sieber, and Peter Kornicki, 109-143 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022), 109-143.

“Vernacular Story in and as Archives: (Re)Making Xingshi yan Stories in Early Modern China and Korea.” Journal of Korean Studies 24, no. 2 (October 2019): 373–392.

“Faithful Women in Jin Ping Mei: Literary Borrowing, Adaptation, and Reinterpretation.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 40 (December 2018): 33–50.