Hongjian Wang
- Associate Professor // Chinese // SLC
- Affiliated Faculty // Film and Video Production // Rueff School
- Associate Professor // Comparative Literature // SLC
- Associate Professor // Asian Studies // SLC
- Associate Professor // SLC
- Associate Professor // SIS
Research Focus
Chinese and Comparative Literature
Office and Contact
Room: SC G022
Email: wang2512@purdue.edu
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, University of California, Riverside, 2012
Specialization
Hongjian Wang is a literary comparatist, film scholar, and cultural historian by training. Her research interest includes modern and contemporary Chinese literature, film, performing arts, media, and cultural history, with a focus on the ever-changing dynamics among the state, the cultural elite, and the populace, especially expressed in the “performativity” in modern Chinese literature and art. Her monograph, Decadence in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Culture: A Comparative and Literary-Historical Reevaluation, uses the original notions of late-nineteenth-century European Decadence as a critical lens to re-examine twentieth-century Chinese literature and to illuminate the changing status of China’s modern cultural elite. Her current book project, The Laughter of the Others: Satiric Skits on the CCTV Spring Festival Gala and China’s Post-Socialist Condition, examines the comic portrayal of various types of Cultural Others—occupational, sexual, age, regional, ethnic, or racial—in the Spring Festival Gala on China’s Central Television to shed light on the evolving social values and cultural dynamics in contemporary China.
Personal Website:
https://sites.google.com/view/hongjian-wang/home
Selected Publications:
Book
Decadence in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture: A Comparative and Literary-Historical Reevaluation. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2020.
Refereed Journal Articles
“The Uneasy Entanglement with the Socialist Legacy: Remapping Avant-Garde Theatre in Post-Socialist China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 36, no. 2, 2024, pp. 344–378.
“From Court Fools to Stage Puppets: Country Bumpkins in the Skits on CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala (1983–2022).”China Quarterly vol. 250, 2022, pp. 552–571.
“Theatre of ‘Disbelief’: Meng Jinghui’s Cynical Metatheatre in Contemporary China.” Asian Theater Journal, vol. 37, no. 2, 2020, pp. 376–397.
“A Chinese Ghost Story: A Hong Kong Comedy Film’s Cult Following in Mainland China.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas, vol. 12, no. 2, 2018, pp. 142–157.
Refereed Book Chapters
“Documenting through Reenacting: Revisiting the Performative Mode in Chinese Independent Documentaries.” Filming the Everyday: Independent Documentaries in Twenty-First-Century China, edited by Paul Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016. pp. 153–165.
“Pillar of the Nation: Photographic Representation of ‘Modern’ Chinese Masculinity in the Liangyou Pictorial.” Liangyou, Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis, 1926-1945, edited by Paul Pickowicz, Kuiyi Shen and Yingjin Zhang, Brill Academic Publishers, 2013, pp.161–178.
Book Review
“Review of The Evolution of the Chinese Internet: Creative Visibility in the Digital Public, by Shaohua Guo (Stanford University Press, 2020).” Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 81, no. 1, 2022, 167–168.