Jessie Ranting Zhang

Jessie Zhang is a PhD student in EALC, working on medieval Chinese literature and culture. Before coming to Harvard, she received her LLB in Law from the London School of Economics and her MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University. Her master’s thesis examines the acoustic world of late Wei through the Eastern Jin, tracing how sound and listening became crucial media for thinking about transcendence and mortality. Her current interests extend to sensory experience across literary forms in medieval China, especially in relation to questions of the body and materiality. She is also interested in memory and historiography, as well as literary representations of trauma and displacement.