Education

  • Ph.D., East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

Biography

Margaret B. Wan is Professor of Chinese Literature and Cultural History.  She is the author of Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture: Chinese Drum Ballads, 1800-1937 (Harvard, 2020) and “Green Peony” and the Rise of the Chinese Martial Arts Novel (SUNY, 2009).  She is also co-editor of Yangzhou – A Place in Literature: The Local in Chinese Cultural History (Hawaii, 2015) and The Interplay of the Oral and the Written in Chinese Popular Literature (NIAS, 2010). Her current book project, “Transmission, Access, and Individual Agency in Chinese Vernacular Short Stories,” explores the link between print, vernacular, and concepts of the individual through the lens of Chinese vernacular short stories, focusing on the popular anthology Marvels Old and New (Jin gu qiguan, 1650s).  By treating the short stories as a system and bringing together history of the book, spatial analysis, and literature, this project will contribute to a broader sense of literate culture in Ming-Qing China. She has been awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Andrew Mellon Foundation.  She is the recipient of the Ramona Cannon Award for Teaching Excellence at the University of Utah and the Bok Center Distinction in Teaching Award at Harvard University.  She is Associate Editor of CHINOPERL, an international journal devoted to Chinese oral and performing literatureShe received her Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Editorship