Faculty Details

Xiaojue Wang is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and Director of Graduate Studies in the Program in Comparative Literature. Her research interests are Chinese literature and culture from late imperial to contemporary periods, cultural Cold War studies in global Asias, Chinese-German intellectual connections, the Sinophone South, film and media studies, sound studies, sonic environmentalism, gender and sexuality, and comparative literature.

She is the author of Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature across the 1949 Divide (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), which examines the diverse, dynamic cultural practices in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas across the 1949 Chinese divide. The book repositions modern Chinese literature within the global context of the Cold War, developing an original framework that challenges the conventional model of national literature. An updated and translated edition was published by Linking Press in Taipei in 2024, reflecting the latest research and developments in the field of cultural Cold War studies.

Professor Wang is completing her second book, The Edges of Literature: Eileen Chang and the Aesthetics of Deviation, which seeks to chart the Cold War cultural geography in the transpacific and global Asias.

Her current project examines the formation of sonic modernity across transnational Sinophone regions since the 19^th century. It attends to the soundscape generated by the interplay between humans and their natural or built environment in literature, films, and other forms of media.

Her work has appeared in various leading journals. She is also the Chinese translator or co-translator of Jürgen Habermas’ Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Horkheimer Reader, Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, and John Fiske’s Understanding Popular Culture, among others.