Profile

Shu Yang is a doctoral candidate specializing in modern and contemporary Chinese literary and cultural studies. Before coming to Oregon, she received her M.A. in Comparative Literature at the Beijing Normal University.

Shu’s dissertation, “Grafted Identities: Shrews and the New Woman Narrative (1910s-1960s),” is the first study to explore the connection between the modern new woman and the traditional shrew across the first half of the twentieth century. The interdisciplinary scope of her research includes shrew/new woman depictions in literary texts, the press, theater, and other visual representations of real and fictional models of the new woman from the Republican to the Socialist period, spanning early Chinese suffragettes, modern Nora models, and socialist shrewish wives. Shu’s study responds to claims made by scholars of Ming and Qing literature that suggest the demise of shrew literature as China entered the modern age. Her work also maps out an alternative lineage for the new woman in modern China that gave rise to new women as powerful and independent social actors.