Chinese Literature - Li-hua Ying 2010

About the Author

Li-hua Ying was born and raised in southwestern China. After receiving her bachelor’s degree in English from Yunnan Normal University in Kunming, she came to the United States in 1982 to pursue her graduate studies at the University of Texas in Austin. She received her master’s degree in English in 1985 with a thesis on the American poet Marianne Moore. In the Comparative Literature Department, also at the University of Texas, she reacquainted herself with the Chinese literary tradition that she had grown up with and enrolled in a combined program of English and American literature and Chinese literature. She was granted her Ph.D. degree in 1991. Her dissertation examined the impact of Western modernism on Chinese literature in the 1980s, particularly the root-seeking movement.

Dr. Ying has taught at Yunnan Normal University, Southwestern University (Texas), University of Texas at Austin, and is presently at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where she is director of the Chinese Program and teaches a wide range of courses on Chinese literature, both classical and modern, including Modern Chinese Fiction, Writing across the Strait: Literature from Taiwan and China, The Theme of Exile in Chinese Poetry and Fiction, Chinese Theater, and others. Along with various articles and papers, she has written the book Cihai wenhui (Magic of the Word: New Trends in Chinese Expressions). Her recent research interest is the representation of Tibet in literature and mass media. She has published translations of contemporary Chinese and American poetry, including poems by Zhang Zao, in Another Kind of Nation: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry, edited by Zhang Er and Chen Dongdong. Dr. Ying also has an abiding interest in Chinese calligraphy and has taught and written on its history and aesthetics. As the executive director of the American Association of Shufa Calligraphy Education, an academic organization based in the United States with an international membership, she is actively engaged in promoting Chinese calligraphy education in the West.