COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Sihan Wang is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literary Studies and Asian Languages & Cultures at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese and Sinophone literature, culture, and intellectual history, situated within the global modernist studies and world literature. Her broader interests include comparative modernities, aesthetics and religion, multimedia modernism, critical animal studies, Sinophone cinema, and Chinese diasporic culture. Her teaching experience spans topics on Chinese, Sinophone, and East Asian literature, film, popular culture, as well as animal studies. 

Her dissertation, “East of Now: Chan Aesthetics and Chinese Modernity,” explores how Chan Buddhism’s distinctive approach to time and experience shaped modern Chinese literature and culture from 1908 to the present, making for a comparative modernist method based on such Chan concept as “the self-emerging present.” Drawing on both literary and visual texts, this project accounts for a mode of Chinese modernity alternative and counter to “European time,” particularly the discourse on modernity based on notions of progress and linear time.  

She is a Mellon Fellow in the Global Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies Cluster. She holds a B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature from Sichuan University and an M.A. in Comparative and World Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has worked as an assistant managing editor for the Zhejiang University Journal of Art and Archaeology in Hangzhou, China. Outside of academic work, she plays the traditional Chinese instrument Guqin and has ongoing projects in creative writing, translations, and promoting experimental literature in the Sinosphere.