Judith T. Zeitlin

Prof. Judith T. Zeitlin

RSEA AM '83
2020 RSEA Alumni Panelist
ProfJudithZeitlin_photo

Judith T. Zeitlin (蔡九迪) is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations and the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. A scholar of early modern Chinese literature, her innovative work combines literary history with other disciplines, including visual and material culture, theater, music, medicine, gender studies, and film.

Her many publications include The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature (2007), Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale (1993), and co-edited works such as Writing and Materiality in China (2000), Thinking in Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History (2007), Chinese Opera Film (2010), and The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality (2019).

In 2014, Zeitlin co-curated a major exhibition at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art called Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture. She is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies, among others. Her current projects include a book on the culture of musical entertainment in early modern China and the creation of a new opera based on a Chinese ghost story in collaboration with composer Yao Chen.

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