Research Expertise and Interest

Chinese literature, Ming and Qing fiction and drama, material culture, pre-modern women poets and dramatists

Research Description

Sophie Volpp, professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature, joined the Berkeley faculty in 2003.  Her research concerns Chinese literature of the 16th through 19th centuries. Teaching interests include literature and material culture, reading fictional character, and literature of exile and migration.  She is the author of Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth-Century China (Harvard, 2011) and The Substance of Fiction: Literary Objects in China, 1550-1775 (Columbia, 2022). She has also translated the work of pre-modern women poets and dramatists. She is currently at work on two projects: a book entitled Rare Books in Exile about the efforts of the National Peip'ing Library (now the National Library of China) to preserve its rare book collection during the Second Sino-Japanese war, and a book about the figuration of referents in the eighteenth-century novel The Story of the Stone (Honglou meng) entitled The Stone and the World.