Judith T. Zeitlin

Judith T. Zeitlin (b. 1958^[1]; Chinese: 蔡九迪) is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.^[2] Her areas of interest are Ming-Qing literary and cultural history, with specialties in the classical tale and drama. In 2011 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.^[3]

She describes her personal interests on her academic page at the University of Chicago as follows:

I’m especially interested in combining literary concerns with other disciplines, such as visual and material culture, medicine, performance, music, and film. I have two books coming out next year, both coming out from the University of Hawaii Press in 2007. The first, called The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature explores the representation of ghosts across the range of literary genres in the late Ming and early Qing, specifically the fantasy of a female corpse revived through love, the imagination of death through a ghostly poetic voice, the mourning of the historical past by the present, and the theatricality of the split between body and soul. The second book is an interdisciplinary volume of essays, co-edited with Charlotte Furth and Ping-chen Hsiung, entitled Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History to which I contributed a piece on the literary self-fashioning of a famous and garrulous sixteenth-century physician named Sun Yikui. I’m currently co-editing another interdisciplinary volume of essays with Joseph Lam, tentatively entitled Musiking the Late Ming, which grew out of a conference we co-organized in May 2006 at the University of Michigan. Two of my current research projects involve tracing the cultural biography of a rare musical instrument as a way to understand the role of things in Chinese literature, and exploring the pleasure quarters as a site of cultural production in music and print.^[4]

She is the daughter of classics scholar Froma Zeitlin and the sister of the economic historian Jonathan Zeitlin.^[3]

Selected publications

• Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale_志怪史家:蒲松齡與中國古代傳奇小說 (Stanford, 1993)
• Writing and Materiality in China, co-edited with Lydia Liu (Harvard, 2003)
• "Shared Dreams: The Story of the Three Wives' Commentary on The Peony Pavilion" (1994)
• "Disappearing Verses: Writings on Walls and Anxieties of Loss" in Writing and Materiality (2003)
• "The Life and Death of the Image: Ghosts and Portraits in Chinese Literature" in Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture, ed. Wu Hung and Katherine Tsiang (Harvard, 2005)
• "Notes of Flesh: The Courtesan's Song in Seventeenth-Century China," in The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon (Oxford, 2006)
• "The Return of the Palace Lady" in Cultural Innovation and Dynastic Decline, ed. David Wang and Wei Shang (Harvard, 2006)
• "Music and Performance in Palace of Lasting Life" in Trauma and Transcendence in Chinese Literature, ed. Idema, Li, and Widmer (2006)
• "Xiaoshuo" in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti (2006)

References