Wei Shang

Wm. Theodore and Fanny Brett de Bary and Class of 1941 Collegiate Professor of Asian Humanities and Du Family Professor of Chinese Culture, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

Premodern Chinese literature and cultural history

Professor Shang’s research interests include print culture, book history, intellectual history, and the fiction and drama of the late imperial period. Currently, Professor Shang is working on two book projects, “Jin Ping Mei Cihua and Commercial Publicity: Narrative Construction of the Everyday World in Late Imperial China”; and “The Story of the Stone and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture, 1791–1949.” The Columbia Book of Yuan Drama, which he coedited with C. T. Hsia and George Kao, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. His book Rulin waishi and Cultural Transformation in Late Imperial China (Harvard University Press, 2003) addresses the role of ritual and fiction in shaping the intellectual and cultural changes of the eighteenth century. His other publications include “Jin Ping Mei Cihua and Late Ming Print Culture,” in Writing and Materiality in China, ed. Judith Zeitlin and Lydia Liu(Harvard University Asian Center, 2003); “The Making of the Everyday World: Jin Ping Mei Cihua and Encyclopedias for Daily Use,” in Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2006); and “Ritual, Ritual Manuals, and the Crisis of the Confucian World: An Interpretation of Rulin waishi,” in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 58, no. 2 (December 1998).

Professor Shang received his BA and MA from Peking University (1982, 1984) and his PhD from Harvard (1994). He joined the Columbia faculty in 1997 and became associate professor in 2002.

Email: ws110@columbia.edu