Meow Hui Goh specializes in the literature, literary history, and cultural history of medieval China. Her most recent research focuses on narrating literary history through memory, emotion, genuineness, and other mental or affective experiences, though she has also published on prosody and poetics, the Buddhist influence on early medieval poetry, the propagandistic function of literature, and other topics. She is currently working on two book projects. The first, which is near completion, is titled The Double Life of Chaos: Living Memory and Literature in Early Medieval China, 180s–300s. This study tracks the complex contour of the literary remembrances of the collapse of the four-hundred-year-old Han dynasty as it was happening and in its immediate aftermath. As the literature-memory of the first half of the early medieval period reveals, chaos was experienced in diverse and idiosyncratic ways, conditioned by earlier narratives and yet unbounded by them. The second, tentatively titled “Fake News, Genuine Words: Literature of Wei 僞in Chinese Manuscript Culture,” interrogates issues of authenticity, reality-making, and media through works lurking at the margins of Chinese literature.

She received the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation’s Scholar Grant for the first of her two current book projects. She has also been the recipient of an ACLS conference grant, a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University, and other awards. She regularly offers classes in premodern Chinese literature and has designed undergraduate courses that aimed at teaching emotional intelligence through Chinese literature. A selection of her recent publications includes:

Sound and Sight: Poetry and Courtier Culture in the Yongming Era (483-493). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.

“Renewal in and Through Landscape: The Great Medieval Chinese Poet Xie Lingyun.” In Ken Seigneurie (General Editor), Susan Andrade, Chris Lupke, B. Venkat Mani, Wen-chin Ouyang, and Dan Selden Ken, eds., Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Literature. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020. Essay 41.

“Artful Remembrance: Reading, Writing, and Reconstructing the Fallen State in Lu Ji’s ‘Bian wang’.” In Wendy Swartz and Robert Campany, eds., Memory in Medieval China. Leiden: Brill, 2018. 10-35.

“The Struggling Buddhist Mind: Shen Yue.” In Zong-qi Cai, ed., How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context: Poetic Culture from Antiquity Through the Tang. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 146-156.

“The Art of Wartime Propaganda: Chen Lin’s Xi Written on behalf of Yuan Shao and Cao Cao.” Early Medieval China 23 (2017): 42-66.

“The Art of Wartime Propaganda: Chen Lin’s PDF version

Chinese version: Wu Miaohui 吳妙慧. “Zhanshi xuanchuan de yishu: lun Chen Lin wei Yuan Shao ji Cao Cao suo zuo zhi xi wen” 戰時宣傳的藝術：論陳琳為袁紹及曹操所作之檄文. In Jiang Yin 蒋寅, ed., Haiwai Zhongguo gudian wenxue yanjiu yi cong 海外中国古典文学研究译丛. Nanjing: Fenghuang chubanshe, forthcoming.

“The Rhyme Book Culture of Pre-Tang China.” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 2.2 (Nov 2015): 419-443.

Areas of Expertise

·medieval Chinese Literature, medieval Chinese literary and cultural history, memory and text in medieval China, the instrumentality of medieval Chinese literature