Professor Wu’s research concerns the literary and intellectual history of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century China, particularly classical poetry written in a modern context. An examination of the works and activities of previously neglected poets who maintained their commitment to traditional aesthetic ideals, her first book Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition 1900-1937 (Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2013), illuminates the splendor of Chinese lyricism and highlights the mutually transformative power of the modern and the archaic. Complementing her passion for poetry (from the classical to the contemporary), her scholarly interests also include the relationship between image and text, questions of gender, and the issue of emotion. She is working on her second book project, which is tentatively titled “Emotion in Transit: Text and Image in Modern China.” Prior to joining the faculty of HKUST, Wu was an associate professor at Wesleyan University, where she taught for eight years. She was the receipt of an An Wang postdoctoral fellowship from the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, a Junior Scholar Grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. 

Research Interests

Chinese literary and visual modernity; Media, visual, and verbal culture; Chinese poetry; History of photography in China.

Representative Publications