Xiaofei Tian

After teaching at Colgate University and Cornell University, Xiaofei Tian joined Harvard EALC in 2000. While her main teaching and research area is Chinese literature and cultural history of the Middle Period (first through thirteenth century CE), she has also taught and published on late imperial, modern, and contemporary literature and culture. Her interest in poetry and poetics, the mediality of literature, court culture, and Chinese literature’s complex negotiations with Buddhism has been driving much of her work. Her book Tao Yuanming and Manuscript Culture (a Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2006) examines how scribes, editors, readers, and commentators participated in constructing the image of the iconic poet. Another book, Beacon Fire and Shooting Star: The Literary Culture of the Liang (502–557), contextualizes the splendid court literature of a much maligned period in Chinese history and proposes the emergence of a new poetics informed by the Buddhist view of the phenomenal world. Her book on the great sixteenth-century novel The Plum in the Golden Vase (秋水堂論金瓶梅) explores the Buddhist vision embodied in the novel’s Chongzhen recension, and argues for an awareness of the cultural politics and ideological choices embedded in modern scholarship on Jinpingmei. 

How does one articulate difficult personal experiences, such as trauma, violence, or encounters with the foreign and the strange, in literary writings? How has premodern Chinese cultural tradition continued, in fascinating metamorphoses, into modern and contemporary times? These are the questions she explores in Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China, and The Halberd at Red Cliff: Jian’an and the Three Kingdoms. Her interest in the nineteenth century, a time that witnessed the negotiation of old and new, led to the translation of a memoir of the Taiping War, The World of a Tiny Insect, with a critical introduction and notes (awarded the inaugural Patrick D. Hanan Prize by Association for Asian Studies in 2016). She has long been interested in the cultural implications and traumatic impact of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), and have been teaching a course, Art and Violence in the Cultural Revolution, since 2001.

She edited Reading Du Fu: Nine Views, the first collection of essays in English dedicated to the works of the great Tang poet Du Fu (712–770), and co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature (1000 BCE-900 CE) (a Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2018) and Literary History in and beyond China. She authored the chapter “From the Eastern Jin through the Early Tang (317–649 CE)” in The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, and contributed to The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, A New Literary History of Modern China, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature, and other volumes. 

In 2019–2020, as an ACLS Donald J. Munro Centennial Fellow in Chinese Arts and Letters, she completed Family Instructions for the Yan Clan and Other Works by Yan Zhitui (531–590s). In 2023–2024, she was in residence at the University of Muenster in Germany as a recipient of the Humboldt Research Award, and completed a new book, Writing Empire and Self: Poetic Revolution and Cultural Transformation in Early Medieval China (forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2026). She serves as a member of the Editorial Board of the Library of Chinese Humanities (LOCH), a series that presents important works in the classical Chinese tradition in facing-page, scholarly English translation along with the best Chinese texts, available both in print and Open Access online. She has been serving as the editor of Early Medieval China since 2020. Her current research is centered on Tang literature, medieval China and the Global Medieval.

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Curriculum Vitae