Rate My Professor Yanhong Zhu

Yanhong Zhu serves as Department Head and Professor of Chinese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Washington and Lee University. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California and her B.A. from East China Normal University. Before joining Washington and Lee, she held positions as Associate-in-Research at the East Asian Studies Center, University of Southern California from January to August 2013, and as Adjunct Instructor at Occidental College in Fall 2008. Her research interests include critical theory, modern Chinese literature, Chinese film and culture, contemporary Chinese cinema, and Chinese language pedagogy. Zhu teaches Chinese language courses at all levels, including Intermediate Intensive Chinese I and II (CHIN 261, 262), Third-year Chinese Language (CHIN 301), Advanced Chinese I: A Kaleidoscope of China (CHIN 311), Advanced Chinese II: Masterworks of Modern Chinese Literature (CHIN 312), as well as Modern Chinese Literature in Translation (LIT 220) and East Asian Cinema (EALL 215).

Zhu has an extensive publication record. Her forthcoming book chapter, “Gendered Screens: Women, Space, and Social Transformation in the Works of Contemporary Chinese Female Filmmakers,” appears in Crossing Boundaries/Confounding Identity: Chinese Women in Literature, Art, and Film (SUNY Press). Other notable book chapters include “Zhai Yongming” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chinese Poets Since 1949 (2021), “Teaching Chinese Through Film: Rationale, Practice, and Future Directions” in The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Language Teaching (2019), and “Drama-tic Synthesis: Time, Memory, and History in the Writings of the Nine Leaves Poets” in Chinese Poetic Modernisms (2019). She co-edited the special issue Collective Memory and Spatiality: Rethinking Post-Socialist/Colonial/Martial-Law Chinese Cinemas for East Asian Journal of Popular Culture (2015). Key articles feature “The Human and the Beast: Humanity, Animality, and Cultural Critique in Contemporary Chinese Cinema” (Chinese Literature Today, 2018), “The Crisis of the American Dream: On Going-Abroad Films in Contemporary Chinese Cinema” (American Quarterly, 2017), and “A Past Revisited: Re-presentation of the Nanjing Massacre in City of Life and Death” (Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 2013). She has also published several book reviews in journals such as Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews and Canadian Journal of Film Studies. Her works in progress include Reconfiguring Chinese Modernism: The Poetics of Temporality in 1940s Fiction and Poetry and Screening the Unnamable: Chinese Cinema and the Historical Event.