Research Bio

Paula Varsano is a professor of Chinese Literature.  She is interested in the connections and disjunctions between poetic writing and philosophical thought in pre-modern China, especially as pertaining to the question of subjectivity. She is currently revising her book manuscript, Knowing People and Being Known: Lyric Subjectivity in Traditional Chinese Poetry, which seeks to understand "subjectivity" through its varied representation in Chinese poetic writing from the earliest times through the 8th century. She is also the author of Tracking the Banished Immortal: The Poetry of Li Bo and its Critical Reception (Hawaii, 2003), the translator of François Jullien's Eloge de la fadeur (In Praise of Blandness, Zone Books, 2004), and the editor of The Rhetoric of Hiddenness in Traditional Chinese Culture (SUNY, 2016). Most recently, she served as guest editor of the special issue, Hearing Things: Non-Human Voices in Chinese Literary and Visual Arts (Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, 2024). Her numerous published articles pertain to such questions as the literary uses of landscape and spatiality; configurations of the self in poetry;  the intersection of language and the ineffable; and shifting perceptions of the human-nonhuman divide.

Research Expertise and Interest

classical Chinese poetry and poetics (3rd-11th centuries), traditional Chinese literary theory, phenomenology, translation, comparative literature, aesthetics, epistemology