Erxin Wang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. Her dissertation focuses on a group of Ming-dynasty literati, born and active between 1540s-1620s, who were playwrights and/or theater aficionados. Her study mainly examines how these people experienced theater in various ways, and how they remembered, reconstructed, and restaged their lived experience with theater through different literary media. Her dissertation proposal has received the Doctoral Fellowship offered by the Chiang-ching Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (CCKF) for 2023-24 academic year.

Erxin is interested in premodern Chinese literature, Chinese theater, late imperial literati culture, intellectual history, with a special interest in the cross-media interaction between theater and other literary forms such as poetry, diary, prose, and fiction. She has presented several papers at conferences for AAS-in-Asia, Chinese Oral and Performing Literature Conference (CHINOPERL), The Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Conference at University of Kentucky (KFLC), and the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs (MCAA).

She contributed the “Thematic Contents,” “Chronology of Historical Events,” and “Glossary-Index” to How to Read Chinese Drama: A Guided Anthology, edited by Patricia Sieber and Regina S. Llamas, (Columbia University Press, 2021) and “The Story of the Western Wing (1965)” to The Chinese Theater Collaborative.

She is also the translator of Ye Ye, “Yuan-Ming Sanqu Songs as Communal Texts: Discovering Their Literary Vitality from a New Research Perspective,” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 8:1 (April 2021): 113-138 and Shih-pe Wang, “A Play Within a Song: Sanqu Songs Between Literary Refinement (ya) and Popular Appeal (su),” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture (Nov. 2021): 307-340.

Regarding teaching background, Erxin has instructed classes in the Chinese language ranging from the introductory level to the advanced level five. Additionally, she served as the Chinese coordinator at the Individualized Instruction Learning Center (IILC) during the academic year of 2020-21.