Chinese Literature, Performance, and Media Studies

Professor Bender specializes in traditional Chinese performance and performance-connected literature of local Han and ethnic minority cultures in China. He teaches Chinese and East Asian culture courses, a course in Traditional Performance in Contemporary East Asia, and seminars that have included epic and prosimetric literature. Bender has published on a wide variety of subjects, including Suzhou professional storytelling (pingtan) and the oral and written literatures of several Chinese minority cultures. His book on Suzhou storytelling entitled Plum and Bamboo, was published in 2003 by University of Illinois Press. He is currently editing (with Victor Mair) a collection of translations of Chinese local and ethnic oral performance and working with Yi nationality poet Aku Wuwu on a study of traditional and contemporary Yi poetry. An annotated translation entitled Butterfly Mother: Miao (Hmong)Creation Epics from Guizhou Province, China, has recently been published by Hackett Publishing.

Professor Denton specializes in the fiction and literary criticism of the Republican period (1911-49). He regularly teaches undergraduate courses in modern Chinese literature in translation, Asian American film, and Chinese film, as well as graduate courses and seminars on modern Chinese fiction, the writer Lu Xun, popular culture, and Chinese film. He is especially interested in the inception and formation of a discourse of modernity in the May Fourth period and how that discourse was to some degree informed and shaped by traditional concerns. Professor Denton's edited collection, Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature. 1893-1945, was published by Stanford University Press in 1996. Two years later, his The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling was also published by Stanford. He is associate editor of the Chinese section of The Columbia Companion to Modern East Literature (Columbia, 2003) and a coeditor of China: Adapting the Past, Confronting the Future (Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002). He is co-editor, with Michel Hockx, of Literary Societies in Republican China (Lexington, 2008). He has published several articles on museum culture, including in The China Quarterly and Japan Focus, and he is presently writing a book on the politics of historical representation in museums and memorial sites in Greater China entitled Exhibiting the Past: The Politics and Ideology of Museums in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Denton is editor of the journal Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and manager of the online MCLC Resource Center, which hosts the MCLC LIST, a listserv devoted to scholarly discussion on the culture of modern and contemporary China.

Meow Hui Goh is interested in aspects of Chinese poetics that are related to prosody, such as the integration of semantic content and tonal patterns, rhyme schemes, or initial and final consonance. She is also interested in experimental Chinese poetic genres, such as palindromic poems (huiwen shi) and tonal poems (shangsheng shi, rusheng shi, etc.). Her studies also explore how the invention and experimentation of these poetic genres in the Southern Dynasties were shaped by the socio-political and cultural environment in the literary salons within which they took place. Her Ph.D. dissertation (2004) is a study of Wang Rong's (467-493) poetics in the light of the invention of Chinese tonal prosody. She has presented a number of papers at conferences held by the American Oriental Society and the Association of Asian Studies, and she is currently working on a book manuscript that will expand on her Ph.D. dissertation. Her recent article "Tonal Prosody in Three Poems by Wang Rong" appears in the Journal of the American Oriental Society. She offers classes in pre-modern Chinese literature, bibliography, and Classical Chinese.

Patricia Sieber is the author of *Theaters of Desire: Authors, Readers, and the Reproduction of Early Chinese Song-Drama, 1300-2000,* a cross-cultural history of the construction and reception of "Yuan zaju." Her current research project, *The Power of Imprints: Qing-Period Publishing and the Formation of European Sinology, 1720-1860* examines the role that books acquisitions by Europeans in China played in the formation of the literary canon of Chinese belles-lettres in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Other publications include an edited collection of contemporary women's fiction entitled *Red Is Not the Only Color* and articles on canon formation, visuality, and performativity in *Modern Chinese Literature and Culture,* CHINOPERL, *Monumenta Serica,* *Journal of Chinese Religions* and *Contemporary Buddhism" among others. She teaches courses on different facets of traditional Chinese literature, including courses on traditional Chinese novels & drama, the intersection of traditional & modern Chinese literature, and comparative literary relations. She has been a fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies, National Central Library (Taipei), at the Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities (OSU), and at the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.). Her research has been awarded funding from the NEH, ACLS, DAAD and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation among others. As principal project director for OSU's East Asian Studies FY 2006-10 National Resource Center (NRC) and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) grants from the U.S. Department of Education, she currently serves as the director of OSU's East Asian Studies Center as well as the Institute for Chinese Studies.