Pembroke Center

Lingzhen Wang received her B.A. and M.A. from Nanjing University, P.R. China. She came to the United States as a visiting fellow at Harvard University and earned her Ph.D. in East Asian Literature from Cornell University. She joined the Department of East Asian Studies at Brown in 1998. Professor Lingzhen Wang's areas of expertise include modern Chinese literature and culture, women's cinema, critical theory, and transnational feminist and media studies. Her first book, "Personal Matters: Women's Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth-Century China" (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004) studies a group of both well known and lesser-known Chinese women writers in relation to dominant discourses of Chinese modernity, nationalism, revolution, socialism, and market commodification, and emphasizes aspects of women's experience, especially their subjective, emotional, psychic, and bodily activities, that tend to be dismissed in mainstream studies of history and literature. In her second book, "Revisiting Women’s Cinema," Wang ponders the roots of contemporary feminist stagnation and the limits of both commercial mainstream and elite minor cultures by turning to socialist women filmmakers in modern China. Her other research and writing projects include translations of Chinese women writers into English, a study of feminism and politics in the modern world,  and a re-examination of the legacy of socialist feminism.