Kaiyi (Cathy) Shen

Cathy Shen is a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) of premodern Chinese literature and comparative literature at Harvard University. She specializes in literature of the Middle Period (Six Dynasties and Tang) and is interested in poetic emotion, affect theory, genre evolution, the history of private life, and literature in times of sociopolitical upheaval. Her dissertation, “Domesticity and the Emergence of the Private in Mid- to Late Tang,” excavates the personal home as an undiscovered topical site for classical Chinese poetry.