Research Bio

Sophie Volpp 's research concerns Chinese literature of the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries; she also has an interest in the libraries of the Republican period. She has published on fiction and material culture, performance practice and stage architecture, the history of sexuality, and the epistemology of reference.  Her books Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth-Century China (Harvard East Asia Center, 2011), and The Substance of Fiction: Literary Objects in China, 1550-1775 (Columbia, 2022) examine the relation of literary words to the world beyond. Essays regarding pre-modern Chinese fiction and drama have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Journal of Theater Studies, positions: east asia cultures critique and Papers on Chinese Literature. She has also translated the writing of poets and playwrights of the 12th through 19th centuries. She has two books in progress, The Story of the Stone and the Aesthetics of Waste and Rare Books in Exile: the 102 Crates of the National Peiping Library. 

Research Expertise and Interest

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