Xuezhao Li is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. She conducts research on modern Chinese adventure fiction, encompassing translations from Western countries and Japan, and original works in Chinese published between 1898 and 1919. Her dissertation is an interdisciplinary project drawing on Digital Humanities tools and methods from translation history, postcolonial studies, and transcultural studies. The thesis identifies modern Chinese adventure fiction as a “translational” genre, arguing that this genre’s translationality is a literary manifestation of the colonial modernity produced in the context of China’s political transformation during the late Qing and early Republican periods.

Xuezhao is interested in Digital Humanities, modern Chinese genre fiction, literary translation in late Qing and early Republican China, and the transcultural history of Chinese drama among other topics. Alongside a number of publications in Chinese, she has published articles in English-language journals. Her essay that addresses modern Chinese male writers’ practice of writing feminist novels was published in Transnational Asia (2024). Another paper examining the relationship between literary translation and language reforms in modern China (2020) and an interview with Professor Jonathan Stalling on translating between different literary systems (2022) were published in Comparative Literature & World Literature.

She has presented papers at the 2023 ALTA (American Literary Translators Association) Conference, the 2024 annual meeting of ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association), the DH 2024 Conference, the 2025 MLA (Modern Language Association) Annual Convention, and the 2025 AAS (Association for Asian Studies) Annual Conference among others. She also attended workshops and symposia in Translation Studies, Digital Humanities, and Asian culture in China, Europe, and the US, including participation in the “Bristol Translates Summer School” (2022) and the OSU “Summer Translation Collaborative I” (2023).

In addition to her interest in Translation Studies, Xuezhao is also a practicing literary and academic translator (Chinese/English, English/Chinese). Her translations of three short stories by late Qing writer Wang Tao (1828-1897) were published in Renditions (2024). She also has a translation of modern Chinese writer Wang Zengqi’s short story “Butter Pancakes” (2021) published by the MCLC (Modern Chinese Literature and Culture) Resource Center. In 2023, her translation of an essay by Professor Patricia Sieber appeared in Lingnan xuebao (Lingnan Journal of Chinese Studies), under the title “Ziyou fengwei: Qiantan sanqu yasu youzhi de benzhi 自有風味 : 淺談散曲雅俗有致的本質.” She has contributed to the CTC (Chinese Theater Collaborative) site a module on Chen Kaige’s film adaptation (Sacrifice, 2010) of the traditional Chinese drama Zhaoshi gu’er (The Orphan of Zhao).

Xuezhao served as a student member of the DEALL Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee between 2021 and 2023. She also worked as a Graduate Editorial Associate in the Translation and Interpreting (T&I) Program at the Center of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (CLLC) between 2022 and 2024 with a particular focus on editing and distributing the T&I newsletter WordWise. She organized an online reading group on Translation Studies between 2022 and 2023 and has been leading a reading group on Digital Humanities since 2024.