Lili Xia

Assistant Professor of Premodern Chinese Literature, Barnard College

Office: 317 Milbank Hall, Barnard College

Office Hours: On leave in fall 2026
W 4:10–6:00pm & by appointment in spring 2027

Educational Background

BA: Fudan University
MA: Fudan University
PhD: Princeton University

Classes Taught

FYSB BC1001 Cultural Memory
AHUM UN1400 Colloquium on Major Texts: East Asia
EAAS BC3840 Beyond the Great Wall: Nomadic Empires and China
EAAS GU4370 Literati Culture in Pre-Modern China
EAAS GR8383 Crossroads in Middle-Period China: Topics of Song-Jin-Yuan Literary Culture

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. She is currently a 2026 visiting fellow at the Ying-shih Yü International Center for History and the Chinese Humanities (YCHCH), National Taiwan University.

Selected Publications

“Teaching Sinitic Knowledge of the Universal Ruler in Jin-Yuan Court Lectures and Civil Education.” Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 55 (2026): 54–102.

“To Build or Not to Build? Frontier Walls, Trenches, and Forts in Mid-Jin Politics, 1161–1208.” Co-authored with Johannes S. Lotze, Zhidong Zhang, and Gideon Shelach-Lavi. T’oung Pao 112 (2026): 163–214.

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

“Two Narratives of ‘Grand Peace’ in Northern Song Historiography and the Song Cultural Memory” (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)