Remembering Yingjin Zhang

November 25, 2022

Dear Colleagues,

It’s with a heavy heart that over the past several days we gradually recognized and accepted the fact that Professor Yingjin Zhang had passed away. Yingjin was the fourth president of the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature, serving our Association from 1992 to 1994, and convening the third ACCL conference, in 1994 at Princeton University.

Many of us, through Facebook postings or emails, shared touching, emotional tributes in which we described how each of us benefited so much from Yingjin’s erudition, generosity, and professional perfectionism. Over the past four decades, Yingjin Zhang was one of the most foundationally important scholars who reshaped our field of modern Chinese studies. He was a pioneer in urban studies, cinema studies, visual studies, transmedia studies, and studies in world literature, with his numerous groundbreaking monographs, an incredibly long list of research articles, and various important anthologies and encyclopedias. Almost all of us, teachers of modern Chinese literature, have taught something written by Yingjin, and his ideas and research have already inspired two or three new generations of younger scholars to find new paths in the academic world. Yingjin has been remembered as a kind, courteous, and principled person, a mentor to many and a friend to all. His contribution to the field has become an integral part of our knowledge, research, and collective memory, which will last and live on. Yingjin will be profoundly missed, and his life and achievement, cherished forever.

Professor Yingjin Zhang was the Distinguished Professor of Modern Chinese Literature in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, where he also served as Department Chair. His research fields included Chinese Literature; Comparative Literature; Cinema and Media Studies; Visual Culture; Literary and Cultural History; Urban Studies. He received his M.A. from the University of Iowa in 1987 and Ph.D. in comparative literature from Stanford University in 1992. Before joining the UCSD faculty in 2001, he taught at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he was honored with an Outstanding Junior Faculty Award in 1996. He has served as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago as well as several Chinese universities, such as Nanjing University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Tongji University, and Wuhan University. His most influential books include: The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film: Configurations of Space, Time, and Gender (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002); Chinese National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2004); and Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010).

Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature

Signed by:

Mingwei Song <msong2@wellesley.edu>, President of ACCL (Professor of Chinese Literature, Wellesley College)
Michelle Yeh, ACCL President 1999-2001 (Distinguished Professor of Chinese, University of California at Davis)
Daniel Fried, ACCL President 2017-2019 (Associate Professor, University of Alberta)
Nicolai Volland, ACCL President 2019-2022 (Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature, Penn State University)
Carlos Rojas, ACCL President 2015-2017 (Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, Duke University)
Sheldon Lu, ACCL President 1991-1992 (Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California at Davis)
Christopher Lupke, ACCL President 2011-2013 (Professor of East Asian Studies, University of Alberta)
Michel Hockx, ACCL President 2002-2004 (Professor of Chinese Literature, University of Notre Dame)
Charles A. Laughlin, ACCL President 2008-2010 (Professor of Chinese Literature, University of Virginia)
Shengqing Wu, ACCL President 2013-2015 (Professor of Chinese Literature, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, ACCL President 1999-2000 & President-Elect 1997-1998 (Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature, The University of Texas at Austin)
Yomi Braester, ACCL President 2006-2008 (Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Washington)
Xiaomei Chen, ACCL Founding President 1988-1989 (Distinguished Professor Emerita of Chinese Literature, University of California, Davis)

https://www.chineseandcomparativelit.org/

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