Lili Xia is a scholar of premodern Chinese literature, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches and cultural history. She is now working on her book manuscript titled “Claiming China against the North-South Divide: Classical Poetry and Literati Culture in the Jurchen Jin Dynasty (1115-1234).” By demonstrating a rival narrative of claiming China in the Sino-Jurchen North against the cultural orthodoxy conceptualized in the Han Chinese-ruled South, the book illustrates the burgeoning literati culture under Jurchen rule, and fleshes out the Jin poetic production in particular, within an intersubjective, transcultural, and border-crossing space of Middle Period Sinosphere (800-1400 CE).
Before coming to Hebrew University, she received her B.A. and M.A. in Classical Chinese Literature at Fudan University, and her Ph.D. in East Asian Studies at Princeton University. Recently, she published an article in the Journal of the American Oriental Society (2022), and a book review in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (2022). She also has some ongoing digital humanities projects using social network analysis and GIS supplementary to her book manuscript.
Guest Course: 46030 “Literati Culture of Late Imperial China, from the Song to the Qing”
Literati culture came into full bloom in late imperial China over the second millennium. Besides belles-lettres like classical poetry and prose, late imperial literati also engaged in calligraphy, painting, and connoisseurship, which in turn shaped their self-identity. This course aims to enrich and retell the literary history of premodern China by defining literati culture as a field of scholarly expertise as well as a “laboratory” of artistic experimentation. It takes an interdisciplinary approach by introducing intellectual and poetic discourses, socio-historical contexts, literary criticism, visual and material culture, in order to envision a “common ground” for Chinese literati community. Textual, visual sources plus material objects are meant to have conversations with each other in this course.