Office: Heyman Center B-204
Office Hours: Wednesdays 2-4 pm (and by appointment)

Email: yz2681@columbia.edu

Classes Taught

Early modern Chinese literature (particularly fiction, drama, and popular literature); urban history; local language, writing, print, and oral media; knowledge and material cultures

Yifan Zhang is a scholar of Chinese literature and cultural history with a focus on the Ming-Qing period (1368-1911). He originally trained in Chinese philology and classical textual scholarship. His interest in the heterogeneity of the Ming-Qing cultural landscape has led him to draw on interdisciplinary methods to engage with both canonical and non-canonical genres, with particular attention to the role of literary practices in world-making.

He is currently preparing a book manuscript based on his dissertation on the entrepreneurial editor Feng Menglong’s (1574-1646) Mountain Songs. This project explores the generative potential of the local Wu language, otherwise marginalized or romanticized, in Feng’s artful reinvention of a racy song genre across media, and in the making of the city of Suzhou as both a material arena and sensuous imagery of fashion in early modern China. By rectifying conventional discourses on the folksong, it offers a new framework for understanding the localized, embodied dynamics of early modern culture-making.

His second book project seeks to probe the interrelation between environmental disorder, literary imagination, and empire-building by focusing on the issue of water in China’s long eighteenth century. His other ongoing projects include the craze for a Suzhou-branded playing-card game in the seventeenth century, and the intertwined aesthetics of Ming-Qing vernacular fiction and the decorative arts of domestic spaces and objects.

Classes Taught

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.