Matthew Wild
Spring 2026 Office Hours: Monday and Wednesday 3:30–4:30 pm and by appointment.
Matthew Wild works on classical Chinese literature and intellectual history. He is completing a book manuscript titled Sounding Public: Voice and the Aesthetics of Evidence in High Qing China, which offers a fresh account of eighteenth-century Chinese literary culture and the philological movement known as "evidential learning" (kaozheng xue). Taking the poet Huang Jingren (1749–1783) as its center, the book invites renewed attention to a rich world of poetic thinking and literary public life that the collapse of the imperial order and the reorganization of knowledge in modern China have left almost inaudible.
He is also co-authoring, with Robert Ashmore (UC Berkeley), Literary Sinitic: A Field Guide. Designed as both a classroom textbook and a self-study handbook, this guide presents a practical, first-principles approach to the language and shared written heritage of premodern East Asia.
Matthew received his BA in Chinese from Reed College and his PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of California, Berkeley.