Yifan Zhang

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.