Dear Colleagues, please find a compilation of panels related to the study of Chinese and East Asian Literatures at the MLA (Toronto, Jan. 8-11). We hope to see you there!
Warmly,
MLA Committees on Ming and Qing China & Pre-14th Century China
Thursday, 8 January 2026
16 – Natural Time and Human Narratives: Competing Temporal Orders in the Premodern World [LLC Pre-14th-Century Chinese]
Thursday, 8 January, 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM – MTCC – 601A
Presider: Natasha Heller (U of Virginia)
Presentations:
● Blowing Charis: Prophecy and Reproduction in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Kate Gilhuly (Wellesley C)
● Astral Immediacy in Early Empires, Heng Du (Wellesley C)
● Arboreal Temporalities in Buddhist Monasteries, Natasha Heller (U of Virginia)
● Periodizing Premodernity: Early Modern European Scholarship on the Ancient/Medieval Divide, Frederic Clark (U of Southern California)
42 – Conflicts and Kinship in Contemporary Sinophone Films
[LLC Pre-14th-Century Chinese]
Thursday, 8 January, 1:45 PM – 3:00 PM – MTCC – 713A
Presider: Jack Hang-tat Long (York U)
Respondent: Carlos Rojas (Duke U)
Presentations:
● Negotiating Linguistic and Cultural Conflicts in The Greatest Wedding on Earth, Jessica Tsui-Yan Li (York U)
● Women in the Middle: Family Ties in Ho Chao-ti’s Sock ’n Roll, Hsiu-Chuang Deppman (Oberlin C)
● Queering Kinship and Polylocality in Sinophone Cinema, Alvin K. Wong (U of Hong Kong)
71 – The Afterlives of a Movement: Representations of Protest in the Sinophone World
[LLC Modern and Contemporary Chinese]
Thursday, 8 January, 3:30 PM – 4:45 PM – MTCC – 713A
Presider: Clara Iwasaki (U of Alberta)
Presentations:
● Spectral Witnessing: Literary Testimonies of Postmovement Hong Kong Literature, Gang Huang (Washington U in St. Louis)
● Aqueous Logics: Toward a Hydro Feminist Approach to Hong Kong’s Futurisms, Carissa Ma (Florida Atlantic U)
● Disconnect and Reboot: The Spatial Choreography in Taiwan and Hong Kong’s Social Movements, Yen Jen Chen (U of Texas, Austin)
● The Writing’s on the Wall: 2020s Hong Kong, Jerrine Tan (City U of Hong Kong)
72 – Family Resemblances in East Asian Anthologies
Thursday, 8 January, 3:30 PM – 4:45 PM, MTCC – 706
Presider: Edward B. Kamens (Yale U)
Presentations:
● A Social Network Analysis: Exchange Poetry in Yutai xinyong 玉臺新詠 (New Songs from a Jade Terrace), Mengling Wang, Colgate U
● Literati Families in Honcho monzui, Niels van der Salm (Leiden U)
● In the Eyes of the Beholder: Familial Resemblances in The Tale of Genji, Edward B. Kamens (Yale U)
● Familial Clusters in Tekagami (‘Calligraphy Albums’), Mary Gilstad (UCLA)
107 – East Asian Social Media as Cultural Form
[LLC East Asian]
Thursday, 8 January, 5:15 PM – 6:30 PM – MTCC – 601A
Presider: Carlos Rojas (Duke U)
Presentations:
● Eat and Protest! Impeachment Apps, Platform Activisms, and Crisis Communication in South Korea, SaeHim Park (Chinese U of Hong Kong)
● The Social-Sharing Media of Japan, Amanda Kennell (U of Notre Dame)
● Platforming Techno-Orientalism, Leland Tabares (Colorado C)
● ‘If I Die, Turn All My Tweets into a Book’: Social Media as Literary Form, Eileen Chengyin Chow (Duke U)
116 – Rhythm: Embodiment and Enculturation
[TM Language Theory]
Thursday, 8 January, 5:15 PM – 6:30 PM – MTCC – 711
Presider: Haun Saussy (U of Chicago)
Presentations:
● The Architectural Rhythm of Prose: Claude McKay’s Banjo and the Rhythm Analysis of Marseilles, Jason Folk (U at Buffalo, State U of New York)
● Rhythmic Perturbations: Translated Songs and the Modernization of Chinese Prosody, Xi Zhao (U of California, Berkeley)
● Who Is Singing of ‘Sehnsucht’?, Ulrike Baur (U of Oregon)
135 – Teaching Transnational East Asia in Comparative Contexts
[LLC Japanese to 1900]
Thursday, 8 January, 7:00 PM – 8:15 PM – VIRTUAL
Presider: William Hedberg (Arizona State U)
Speakers:
● Charo B. D’Etcheverry (U of Wisconsin, Madison)
● Katarzyna Bartoszynska (Ithaca C)
● Jeffrey Niedermaier (Brown U)
● Si Nae Park (Harvard U)
● Christine Welch (independent scholar)
145 – Negotiating Gender, Virtue, and Domesticity in Medieval Italian and Ming Chinese Novellas
[LLC Ming and Qing Chinese; LLC Medieval and Renaissance Italian]
Thursday, 8 January, 7:00 PM – 8:15 PM – VIRTUAL
Respondent: Jelena Todorovic (U of Wisconsin, Madison)
Presentations:
● Economy of Slavery and Literary Influences in Decameron V.7, Beatrice Arduini (U of Washington, Seattle)
● ‘Thou Shalt Not’: Adultery and Confession in Decameron VII.5, Angela Porcarelli (Emory U)
● Tormented Wives and Family Reunions: Griselda and Her Chinese Sisters, Maria Franca Sibau (Emory U)
● Sixteenth-Century Chinese Erotic Novellas: Medium Literacy and the Forming of Families, Xiaoqiao Ling (Arizona State U)
158 – Rethinking the Humanities: Engaging the Past, Confronting the Present
Thursday, 8 January, 7:00 PM – 8:15 PM – MTCC – 715B
[LLC 17th-Century English]
Scholars of the early modern and premodern past share how their archives, ways of knowing, methods, and questions shape the work they do in the classroom in response to the pressing issues of our time. Speakers reflect on their teaching of anglophone texts, Arabic literature and culture, and China’s Classical Confucianism.
Presider: Kirsten Mendoza (U of Dayton)
Speakers:
● Sherif Abdelkarim (C of the Holy Cross)
● Heng Du (Wellesley C)
● Corey McEleney (Fordham U, Bronx)
● Elizabeth Sauer (Brock U)
Friday, 9 January 2026
165 – Repackaging Orientalism: Premodern Japan in Contemporary Global Media
Friday, 9 January, 8:30 AM – 9:45 AM, MTCC – 709
Scholars of Japanese literature discuss how the history and culture of premodern Japan has been depicted in recent western and global media, investigating how various Orientalist tropes continue to be featured and repackaged for modern consumption through popular films, television, music, and video games.
Presider & Respondent: Michael McCarty (Salisbury U)
Speakers
● Eric Jose Esteban (Yale U)
● Sachi Schmidt-Hori (Dartmouth C)
● Robert Tuck (Arizona State U, Tempe)
171 – Branding and Materiality in Early Modern China and Beyond
[LLC Ming and Qing Chinese]
Friday, 9 January, 8:30 AM – 9:45 AM, MTCC – 206D
Presider & Respondent: Ariel Fox (U of Chicago)
Presentations:
● The Influencer’s Toilet and Cakes: Chen Jiru as a Brand during the Ming-Qing Era, Wandi Wang (Lehigh U)
● Fashioning Place: Textile Branding and Regional Craftsmanship in Ming China, Xiaolin Duan (North Carolina State U)
● Paper Reading: A Critical Inquiry of East-West Cultural Exchanges in the Global Early Modern Era, Xiaojie Xu (Tōyō Bunko)
● Branding a Late Qing Magazine: Regional Identity and the Transnational Consumption of Yunnan Journal, Jie Guo (U of South Carolina, Columbia)
174 – Lineation, Global Modernism, and Comparative Poetics
Friday, 9 January, 8:30 AM – 9:45 AM, MTCC – 802A
Presider: Scott Mehl (Colgate U)
Respondent: Liesl Yamaguchi (U of California, Berkeley)
Presentations:
● Another Last Romantic, Another First Modernist, Kedar Kulkarni (Flame U)
● Poetics of the Line: Lineation as an Expressive Device in Chinese New Poetry, Xiaoyu Xia (Princeton U)
● E. E. Cummings’s ‘Poempictures,’ Experimental Lineation, and Modernist Transmediality, Bowen Wang (Shanghai Jiaotong U)
● The Limits of Free Verse: Rereading Dhondrup Gyel’s ‘Waterfall of Youth’, Nathaniel Gallant (Princeton U)
198 – Presidential Plenary: What We Fight For
Friday, 9 January, 10:15 AM – 12:00 PM, MTCC – 701A
Many of us share a sense of profound global crisis, and yet what we name as well as experience is local. How do we define and redefine the key issues, and how do we destabilize these new normals? Higher education leaders from various countries and kinds of institutions stitch together a panoptic view of our challenges and strategies. Where do we go from here?
Presider: Tina Lu (Yale U)
Speakers:
● Michael Roth (Wesleyan U)
● Jonathan Holloway (Luce Foundation)
● Alexandra Gillespie (U of Toronto)
● Eileen Chengyin Chow (Duke U)
Just in Time: War, Trauma, and Diaspora in East Asian Kinship
Friday, 9 January, 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM – MTCC – 705
Presider: Richard Bonfiglio (Sogang U)
Presentations:
● The Ritual of Memory and Reframing of the Family Album in Dead to Rights, Jeeson Hong (Sogang U)
● Re-Creating Chinese Mythology and Chinese Diasporic Identities in Pixar’s Turning Red, Kaby Wing-Sze Kung (Hong Kong Metropolitan U)
● AI, Queer Kinship, and the Ethics of Care in Silvia Park’s Luminous, Richard Bonfiglio (Sogang U)
272 – Teaching with Generative AI in East Asian Literature and Culture Studies
[LLC East Asian]
Friday, 9 January, 1:45 PM – 3:00 PM, MTCC – 602B
Presider: Jina Kim (U of Oregon)
Presentations:
● Generative Poetics: AI and Japanese Literary Pedagogy, Andrew Campana (Cornell U)
● The Complex Implications of LLMs for Computational Digital Humanities in Chinese Studies, Paul Vierthaler (Princeton U)
● Expanding Horizons: Teaching Media Ethics through Generative AI in East Asian Humanities, Haerin Shin (Korea U)
273 – Literature, Language, and Games in Early Modern China: Family Resemblance or Different Species?
[LLC Ming and Qing Chinese]
Friday, 9 January, 1:45 PM – 3:00 PM, MTCC – 713A
Respondent: Paize Keulemans (Princeton U)
Presentations:
● When Literature and Game Merged into One: Turning Poetry into a Notational System for the Game of Go, Jiayi Chen (Washington U in St. Louis)
● Shuffling and Dealing Divinity and History: Investiture of the Gods as Game, Rania Huntington (U of Wisconsin, Madison)
● From King of Latrines to God of Gambling: Shit, Money, and the Dramedy of Masculinity, Paola Zamperini (Northwestern U)
● Between Fictionality and Materiality: The Life of the Playing Card across the Ming-Qing Transition, Yifan Zhang (Columbia U)
310 – Sinophone Science Fiction
[LLC Modern and Contemporary Chinese]
Friday, 9 January, 3:30 PM – 4:45 PM, MTCC – 206E
Presider: Nicolai Volland (Penn State U)
Respondent: Nathaniel Isaacson (North Carolina State U)
Presentations:
● Toward Speculative Aesthetics: Island Narratives in Taiwanese Science Fiction and Visual Art, Hsin-Hui Lin (National Chengchi U)
● Chinese Prometheus: The Theme of Artificial Life in Sinophone Science Fiction, Michael O’Krent (Harvard U)
● Neglected Structures in Singapore’s Circle Line, Adam Knee (Lasalle C of the Arts)
318 – Asia-Pacific Ocean and the Blue Humanities: Interspecies Communication, Temporalities, and Media
Friday, 9 January, 3:30 PM – 4:45 PM, MTCC – 602A
Respondent: SaeHim Park (Chinese U of Hong Kong)
Presentations:
● The Cetacean Media of Inscription: Interspecies Communication in Oceanic Taiwan, Tim Shao-Hung Teng (Chinese U of Hong Kong)
● Ocean Salvage as Transpacific Method, Christine Xiong (Stanford U)
● Flows, In and Out: Water as Ecomedia at the Aquarium, Christina Shiea (U of Washington, Seattle)
● Vortices: How to See the Ocean’s Horizon on the Ship, Hyeongjin Oh (independent scholar)
368 – Translation Now
Friday, 9 January, 5:15 PM – 6:30 PM, MTCC – 701A
Translation—across languages and across genre and media—has always been central to our fields. But what it is and how it is construed are both in a state of flux. Translators from a range of traditions consider the rival claims of creativity and fidelity and the threat or promise of generative AI.
Presider: Tina Lu (Yale U)
Speakers:
● Haun Saussy (U of Chicago)
● Carlos Rojas (Duke U)
● Lara Norgaard (Harvard U)
Saturday, 10 January 2026
379 – Becoming and Performing the Literatus in Medieval China
[LLC Pre-14th-Century Chinese]
Saturday, 10 January, 8:30 AM – 9:45 AM – MTCC – 709
Presider: Leihua Weng (Kalamazoo C)
Presentations:
● Scholars as the Alien Kind: Knowledge and Power in Sou Shenji (In Search of the Supernatural), Leihua Weng (Kalamazoo C)
● Xin Qiji’s Lyrics Done in Jest, Chengjuan Sun (Kenyon C)
● Gardens, Textuality, and the City: Identity Building in Middle-Period China, Wanhan Xing (U of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
● ‘Man Honors the Mountain’: Yang Weizhen (1296–1370) and the Aesthetic Turn in Literati Self-Fashion, Zhenxing Zhao (Singapore U of Tech. and Design)
417 – The Poetics of Loss in Early and Medieval Literary Writing
[LLC Pre-14th-Century Chinese]
Saturday, 10 January 2026, 10:15 AM – 11:30 AM MTCC – 601A
Respondent
● D. Vance S
Respondent
● D. Vance Smith (Princeton U)
Presentations
● Losing a Body but Gaining a Self: Poetics of Suicide and Mutilation in Early China, Paula Varsano (U of California, Berkeley)
● Catastrophic Loss: Images of the Crucifixion from the Middle Ages to Marc Chagall, Benjamin Saltzman (U of Chicago)
● Fragmentation and Forgetting: Two Second-Century BCE Accounts of the Loss of the Dao, Mark Csikszentmihalyi (U of California, Berkeley)
● Authorship as Homelessness: Classical China, Michael Hunter (Yale U)
420 – Hydroaesthetics, Hydroscapes, Hydrotexts: Thinking Through Water in the Global South
[Special session]
Saturday, 10 January 2026, 10:15 AM – 11:30 AM MTCC – 2050
Respondent
Margaret Cohen (Stanford U)
Presentations
● Fluid Agency: Tales of Water in Contemporary Taiwan, Nicolai Volland (Penn State U)
● Unstoried Ubiquity: Structural Silences and Domestic Hydroscapes in Nigerian Literature, Comfort Azubuko-Udah (U of Toronto)
● The Hydroaesthetics of Socialist Realism, Claire Roosien (Yale U)
448 – The Futures of East Asian Comparative Literature: Obstacles and Opportunities
[LLC East Asian]
Saturday, 10 January, 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM, MTCC – 714A
Area studies and comparative literary studies have changed much in the past 20 years. This session explores the futures of East Asian comparative literature. Our aim is to explore the ways in which East Asianists think transnationally and across languages to produce new scholarship from fresh perspectives. This includes textual dynamics involving East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, as well as trans-Asian or transregional relationships.
Presider: Satoru Hashimoto (Johns Hopkins U)
Speakers:
● Aoife Cantrill (U of Oxford)
● Wiebke Denecke (MIT)
● Nayoung Aimee Kwon (Duke U)
● Elvin Meng (U of Chicago)
● Jiwei Xiao (Fairfield U)
● Wayne CF Yeung (U of Denver)
473 – Information as Science and as Theory
Saturday, 10 January, 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM, MTCC – 701A
Two distinguished scholars who have thought deeply on the nature of information—a media theorist and critic and an evolutionary biologist—explore the materiality of information and the outcomes of considering information as a system rather than piecemeal. What do true conversations between disciplines imply?
Presider: Tina Lu (Yale U)
Speakers:
● N. Katherine Hayles (Duke U)
● André Kessler (Cornell U)
483 – Banned Books and Beyond: Censoring Practice in Late Imperial China
Saturday, 10 January, 1:45 PM – 3:00 PM, MTCC – 713A
Presider: Yiqun Zhou (Stanford U)
Presentations:
● Navigating Translation and Censorship Rules: The Making of the Ming Veritable Records in Manchu, Shoufu Yin (U of British Columbia)
● Staging the Jin Ping Mei: Censoring Practice in China at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century, Zhaokun Xin (U of Manchester)
● Literary Censorship by Heavenly Bureaucrats: Immoral Literature in Late Qing Morality Tales, Katherine Alexander (U of Colorado – Boulder)
531 – Tracing Multilingualism in China: Late Imperial Era to Modern Times
Saturday, 10 January, 3:30 PM – 4:45 PM, MTCC – 206E
Presider: Richard VanNess Simmons (U of Hong Kong)
Presentations:
● Mandarin Varieties in the Late Ming and Early Qing, Richard VanNess Simmons (U of Hong Kong)
● Incomplete Localization: Three Translations of Aesop’s Fables in the Min Dialects, Sixing Chen (Fujian Normal U)
● The Secret Code to Wealth: Pidgin English in Late Qing Novels, Yuqing Liu (U of Edinburgh)
● Languages on the Periphery: Hunan as a Site of Language Contact and Convergence, Robert Marcelo Sevilla (U of Hong Kong)
535 – Bridging Texts, Communities, and Disciplines: Innovative Approaches to Teaching Chinese Literature
Saturday, 10 January, 3:30 PM – 4:45 PM, MTCC – 709
Presider: Yun Zhu (Temple U)
Speakers:
● Géraldine Fiss (U of California, San Diego)
● Shaohua Guo (Carleton C)
● Dorothee Hou (Moravian U)
● Xin Yang (Macalester C)
● Zhenxing Zhao (Singapore U of Tech. and Design)
● Yun Zhu (Temple U)
● Zongqi Cai (Lingnan U)
574 – The Presidential Address
Saturday, 10 January, 7:00 PM – 8:15 PM, MTCC – 801A
Presider: Paula M. Krebs
Presentations:
● The Report of the Executive Director, Paula M. Krebs
● The Unspeakable, Tina Lu
552 – Nature and Culture in Poetry and Poetics
[LLC Pre-14th-Century Chinese]
Saturday, 10 January 2026, 5:15 PM – 6:30 PM, MTCC – 206E
Participants explore the intricate interplay between nature and culture in poetics across Chinese, Near Eastern, South Asian, and European literature, examining how poets across different historical and geographic contexts have shaped and reshaped the boundaries between the natural world and human creativity.
Speakers
● Giacomo Berchi (Stanford U)
● Timothy Billings (Middlebury C)
● Greg Ellermann (Yale U)
● Evan Nicoll-Johnson (U of Alberta)
● Benjamin Ridgway (Swarthmore C)
● Yunshuang Zhang (Wayne State U)
Respondent:
● Jane Mikkelson (Yale U)
Sunday, 11 January 2025
581 – Navigating Language and Politics in 1980s Sinophone Cultures
Sunday, 11 January, 8:30 AM – 9:45 AM, MTCC – 715B
Participants explore the relationship between language and heterogeneous discourses of Sinophone subjectivity in the shifting linguistic, cultural, and geopolitical spaces of the 1980s, discussing how feminist, nativist, indigenous, diasporic, or politically dissident expressions contribute to a linguistic pluralism in the era’s Sinophone literature, film, media, and popular cultures.
Speakers:
● Géraldine Fiss (U of California, San Diego)
● Alison Groppe (U of Oregon)
● Li Guo (Utah State U)
● Jack Hang-tat Leong (York U)
● Jessica Tsui-Yan Li (York U)
● Wen-chi Li (U Bern)
● Chris Song (U of Toronto)
● Hongmei Sun (George Mason U)
607 – A Mind of Its Own: Animism and Nonhuman Narration
[Forum: TC Cognitive and Affect Studies]
Sunday, 11 January, 10:15 AM – 11:30 AM, MTCC – 605
Presider: Haiyan Lee (Stanford U)
Presentations:
Listening to the Voices of Rivers and Spirits: Khasi Nonhuman Narratives, S Elika Assumi (National Law U Meghalaya)
The Animal, Unspeaking: Sonic Images in Miyazawa Kenji’s Short Stories, Miyabi Goto (U of Kentucky)
The Gaze and Voice of Plants in Can Xue’s Biocentric Short Story ‘I Am a Willow Tree’, Nicoletta Pesaro (Ca’ Foscari U of Venice)
Hybrid Minds: AI Cognition, Human Identity, and the Philosophy of Consciousness in ‘Twin Sparrows’, Kun Qian (U of Pittsburgh)
608 – The Futures of East Asian Comparative Literature: Contemplating New Paradigms
[LLC East Asian]
Sunday, 11 January, 10:15 AM – 11:30 AM, MTCC – 713B
Area studies and comparative literary studies have changed much in the past 20 years. This session explores the futures of East Asian comparative literature. Our aim is to explore the ways in which East Asianists think transnationally and across languages to produce new scholarship from fresh perspectives. This includes textual dynamics involving East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, as well as trans-Asian or transregional relationships.
Presider: Christopher Lupke (U of Alberta)
Speakers:
● Minseung Kim (U of Alberta)
● Ma Xiaolu (UCLA)
● Adhira Mangalagiri (New York U)
● Carles Prado-Fonts (U Oberta de Catalunya)
● Tian Jing The (U of Southern California)
● Karen Thornber (Harvard U)
631 – Translation History of Chinese and into Chinese
[TC Translation Studies]
Sunday, 11 January 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM, MTCC – 601B
Presider: Mary Helen McMurran (U of Western Ontario)
Presentations:
● Retranslations of Zhuangzi: From Burton Watson to Richard John Lynn, Wei Zeng (U of Alberta)
● The Concept of ‘Minzu’ and the Chinese Translations of Canadian Indigenous Literature, Chris Song (U of Toronto, Scarborough); Celine Huang (U of Toronto)
● Self-Translations by Chinese-Language Authors, Simona Gallo (U of Milan)
● Du Fu’s Travels in America and Britain: Text, Context, and Authorial Intent in Translation, Lucas Klein (Arizona State U, Tempe)
632 – Shaping Family Boundaries: Tradition and Change in Early Modern East Asia
Sunday, 11 January 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM, MTCC – 706
Participants explore family boundaries in East Asia from the fourteenth through eighteenth century, focusing on literary and nonliterary discussions of family and friends in China, Choson Korea, Tokugawa Japan, and the Ryukyu Kingdom.
Presider: Ihor Pidhainy (Georgia Gwinnett C)
Speakers:
● Kuan Liu (U of Minnesota, Twin Cities)
● Mark McNally (U of Hawai’i, Manoa)
● Young Kyun Oh (Arizona State U)
● Ihor Pidhainy (Georgia Gwinnett C)
● Ye Yuan (Oberlin C)
635 – Spectral Kinships: Haunting, Trauma, and Kairotic Awakening in Asian Diasporic Narratives
Sunday, 11 January 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM VIRTUAL
Presider: Ji Nang Kim (U of Texas, Arlington)
Presentations:
● The Passed Made Present: Trinh Mai’s Still Quiet and Live Relations, Kelsey Chen (Stanford U)
● Intangible but True Ghosts in Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Xiaowen Xu (U of British Columbia)
● Archive Trauma: Disciplining Punjabi Queer Presence in the Diaspora, Tavleen Purewal (U of New Brunswick)