Yun Bai
Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature
Email baiyun1@shanghaitech.edu.cn
Late imperial Chinese literature, drama, and intellectual history; cognitive narratology; digital humanities.
Educational Background
2015-2022 Ph.D., Yale University, Dept. of East Asian Languages and Literatures. Dissertation: “From Moral Degeneration to Social Negotiation: Deception and Mindreading in Late Imperial Chinese Drama.”
2013-2014 M.A., Yale University, Council on East Asian Studies.
2009-2013 B.A., Tsinghua University, Dept. of Foreign Languages and Literatures.
Prior Employment
2022-2023 Visiting Assistant Professor, Boston University, Dept. of World Languages and Literatures.
2014-2015 Lecturer, New Oriental Education Technology Group.
Profile
Yun Bai holds a PhD from Yale university in premodern Chinese literature. Her research interests include late imperial Chinese literature and theatre, intellectual history, cognitive narratology, and digital humanities. Her dissertation, entitled “From Moral Degeneration to Social Negotiation: Deception and Mindreading in Late Imperial Chinese Drama,” examines theatrical representations of lying, imposture, and other forms of deception in the seventeenth century. In this period, commerce sent scammers to every corner of the country, the notion of social imposture came to the fore along with the new plasticity of social identity, and the booming publishing industry allowed anxieties about deception to run free on the page. Seventeenth-century China was not only an age of deception, but also the period that produced the most writings about deception in Chinese history. As the first book-length study of deception in Chinese literature, her dissertation uses dramas of deception as a lens to examine the tensions among social expectations, moral norms, and literary representations in seventeenth-century China. Building on her dissertation, her first book project, False Things First: Deceit and Dissimulation in Late Imperial China, adopts an interdisciplinary approach to incorporate the articulation of deception in drama, fiction, philosophical discourses, religious doctrines, and legal statutes from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.
With an interest in intellectual history, she is currently working on an article on Wang Yangming. Tentatively titled “Wang Yangming (1472-1529), a Neo-Confucian Master of Deception,” her article wrestles with the apparent paradoxes embodied by Wang Yangming, a neo-Confucian master who celebrated sincerity as a moral ideal in his philosophical teachings yet resorted to deception in his military campaigns. Her interest in digital humanities drives her to take a digital approach to late imperial Chinese theatre. She is currently revising her article “Asides in Early Modern Chinese Drama: The Digital Approach and Its Limits” for resubmission to the Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature.
Publications
“Asides in Early Modern Chinese Drama: The Digital Approach and Its Limits,” under revision at the Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature.