Updates

Fudan Summer Institute

In July 2025 I made my first visit to China since the pandemic to teach for a summer institute for graduate students at Fudan University, “Frontiers of Modern Chinese Literary Studies.” I held ten hours of lectures and discussion over four days on the topic of translation and Chinese-Arabic literary relations since the nineteenth century. At a time when international exchanges face so many challenges, it was particularly rewarding to reconnect with old friends and meet new colleagues. My thanks to the faculty at Fudan who hosted me and to students from across the Sinophone world who attended and offered valuable feedback on my research.

Back from Cairo

From January-June 2024, I spent just under five months as a Fulbright scholar in the Department of English & Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo. During my time in Cairo, I continued my research on cultural relations between China and the Middle East in the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth century and spent quite a bit of time with Arabic primary and secondary sources. We also got to see amazing sights in and around Cairo, Saqqara, Luxor and many other places. I’m very grateful to everyone who made this trip possible: my colleagues at AUC who welcomed me to the community; the dedicated people at the Binational Fulbright Commission of Egypt who arranged our stay; and–of course!–Heidi for going on this adventure with me.

July 2023: Publication of The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought

Clocking in at over 1,000 pages, this abridged translation of the first two volumes of Wang Hui’s Xiandai Zhongguo sixiangde xingqi 现代中国思想的兴起 examines Chinese thought from the Tang and Song dynasties through the early twentieth century. I am grateful to the team of eleven translators who worked through the pandemic to bring this book into English. More information on the book at Harvard University Press’s website.

In spring 2024, Rana Mitter of Harvard published an extensive review of the book in Foreign Affairs under the title “The Real Roots of Xi Jinping Thought.” A review symposium—five reviews and a response from the author—was published in spring 2025 in the Journal of Social and Political Philosophy (link to table of contents here).

Contract for Muslims in Modern China

My co-editor Kristian Petersen and I recently signed a contract with Columbia University Press for Muslims in Modern China: A Sourcebook, which brings together English translations of historical sources from Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Persian, Uyghur, and other languages. Many thanks to our many contributors and collaborators who have supported this work. See my Projects page for more information.

Chapter in Cambridge History of World Literature

A chapter from my project on Chinese and Arabic literatures 1850-1950 was just published in the two-volume Cambridge History of World Literature, ed. Debjani Ganguly. This piece examines the first translation of Taha Husayn’s The Days into Chinese by Ma Junwu, who was one of a group of Chinese Muslim intellectuals who studied at al-Azhar University in Cairo in the 1930s and 1940s. The chapter can be viewed here, or send me an email to request a PDF. I also made an overly long Twitter thread (with good photos) about the piece here.

New Chapter

My short chapter on anthologies of classical and vernacular prose just appeared in Literary Information in China: A History, ed. Jack Chen et. al. from Columbia University Press. Writing this piece allowed me to build on some archival work I did many years ago in the collection of Chinese textbooks at Teachers College at Columbia University.

NEH Fellowship

My current book project was awarded a six-month National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, beginning in July 2021 and ending in December 2021.

New Article

My article on Lin Shu and Mustafa Lutfi al-Manfaluti, “Reading Distance: Port Louis, Cairo, Beijing,” was just published in the October 2020 issue of PMLA. This is the first (and now quite old!) piece that I wrote for my project on Chinese and Arabic Literatures at the End of Empire.

Review Roundup

Here are two recent reviews of Ge Zhaoguang’s What is China? (Belknap, 2018), which I translated:

First, “What Do Chinese Intellectuals Do These Days?,” a review published in Twentieth-Century China by Peter Zarrow (U of Connecticut) that discusses What is China? along with Sebastien Veg’s Minjian: The Rise of China’s Grassroots Intellectuals (Columbia, 2019) and Els van Dongen’s Realistic Revolution: Contesting Chinese History, Culture, and Politics after 1989 (Cambridge, 2019). It’s great to see these works placed in dialogue with one another in the same review.

Second, a review by Richard Belsky (Hunter College) in the May 2020 Pacific Affairs.

NEH Summer Stipend

My project Chinese and Arabic Literatures at the End of Empire was awarded an NEH Summer Stipend for 2020. Although I won’t be able to travel to some of the archives I’ll need to finish the book, I appreciate the opportunity to keep working on couple of chapters that are nearly completed.