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Professor Xia smiles gently at the camera. She is wearing a pale green-gray blazer with a white shirt underneath. Her medium length hair is half up and half down. She is wearing a necklace with a silver chain and pale green stone. Behind her is wood painted pale green.

Lili Xia

Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures

Department

Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures, Comparative Literature

Office

317 Milbank

Office Hours

T 4:10–6:00pm & by appointment

Contact

Lili Xia is a scholar of premodern Chinese literature. Her broader research interests include cultural memory, antiquarianism and canonization, print and book culture, intermediality, and digital humanities.

She is now working on her book project titled “North against South in Middle Period China: Classical Poetry and Literati Culture under Jurchen Jin Rule (1115–1234).” By demonstrating a rival narrative of claiming China in the Sino-Jurchen North against the cultural orthodoxy conceptualized in the Han Chinese-ruled South, the book illustrates the burgeoning literati culture under Jurchen rule, and fleshes out the Jin poetic production in particular. While making full use of Jin literary texts, this book is further enriched by art history and material culture, as well as digital tools of social network and geographic analysis to better represent Jin literati culture on the whole. Her research aims to reveal the heterotopia and heteroglossia of China as an intersubjective, transcultural, and border-crossing space in the Middle Period (800–1400 CE).

Before coming to Barnard, she received her B.A. and M.A. in Classical Chinese Literature at Fudan University, and her Ph.D. in East Asian Studies at Princeton University. She was the 2023–24 Louis Frieberg Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

B.A. – 2013 – Fudan University, Chinese Literature
M.A. – 2016 – Fudan University, Classical Chinese Literature
Ph.D. – 2023 – Princeton University, East Asian Studies

  • Middle-period Chinese literature (800–1400 CE)

  • Sino-steppe interactions

  • Literati culture and art

  • Cultural memory

  • Digital humanities

  • “Qiuchi as Heterotopia: The Other Space for Su Shi.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 142.1 (2022): 93–119.
  • Review of Stephen Owen, All Mine! Happiness, Ownership, and Naming in Eleventh-Century China. The Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 85.2 (2022): 325–27.
  • “Two Narratives of ‘Grand Peace’ in Northern Song Historiography and Cultural Memory of Song Contemporaries.” Zhonghua wenshi luncong (Journal of Chinese Literature and History) 139 (2020): 219–40. (in Chinese)

  • Book project titled “North against South in Middle Period China: Classical Poetry and Literati Culture under Jurchen Jin Rule (1115–1234).”
  • “Social Network Analysis of Middle Period Literati in North China.” Ongoing Digital Humanities collaborative project with the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering (PICSciE). [Online introduction]