Anna M. Shields, Gordon Wu ’58 Professor of Chinese Studies, received her A.M. (1990) from Harvard University and her Ph.D. (1998) from Indiana University. She specializes in classical Chinese literature of the Tang, Five Dynasties, and Northern Song eras. Her particular interests include literary history and the emergence of new literary genres and styles in late medieval China; the sociology of literature; and the role of emotions in classical literature. Her first book, Crafting a Collection: The Cultural Contexts and Poetic Practice of the Collection from among the Flowers (Huajian ji), published by the Harvard Asia Center, examined the emergence of the song lyric in a path-breaking anthology. Her second book, One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China, explores the literary performance of friendship in ninth-century China through a wide range of genres, including letters, prefaces, exchange poetry, and funerary texts. In 2017, One Who Knows Me was awarded the Honorable Mention for the Joseph Levenson Book Prize (pre-1900 China) from the Association of Asian Studies.

Her most recent publication is the 2023 co-edited volume (with Gil Raz, Dartmouth College), Religion and Poetry in Medieval China: The Way and the Words. This volume of interdisciplinary essays examines the intersection of religion and literature in medieval China, and it grew out of a 2017 Princeton conference in honor of the scholarship of Stephen Bokenkamp. She is also co-editing with Robert Hymes (Columbia University) a two-volume set of essays from the Tang-Song Transitions Workshops and Conference held from 2017-2022 at Princeton and Columbia.  In 2024, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete her third monograph, currently titled Legacies of Gold and Jade: Transmissions of Tang Dynasty Literature in the Five Dynasties and Northern Song. 

Other recent and forthcoming publications investigate emotions in medieval letters; the compilation of anthologies of Tang literature in the Northern Song; and the cultural influence of Tang dynasty anecdote collections. She is a two-time recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2005-2006 and 2016-17) that supported the work for the first two monographs.  At Princeton, she served as Acting Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies in 2018-2019 and Chair from 2020-2024.  She served as President of the T’ang Studies Society from 2011-2018. She is a former editor of the East Asian section of the Journal of the American Oriental Society, and is also an editorial board member of the Library of Chinese Humanities Chinese-English translation series, published by De Gruyter. Before her appointment at Princeton, she taught at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she served both as Director of the Honors College (2007-2011) and as associate professor in the Dept. of Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communications (2007-2015), and at the University of Arizona (1999-2006).