Xiaoyu Xia (Ch. 夏小雨) is the Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in East Asian Studies in the Princeton Society of Fellows. A scholar of modern Chinese literature, Xia draws on methods from book history and media studies to probe the interactions among visual, material, textual, and intellectual cultures. Her work traces the heterogeneous composition of modern Chinese books and printing to offer a new lens for considering the fraught transnational condition of Chinese literary modernity and its lasting reverberations in China’s cultural politics.
Her current book project, “Revolution Between the Lines: Typography and Chinese Literary Modernity (1895-1937),” concerns a period that saw China’s conversion to mechanized printing under the influence of Japan and the West. It shows how typography lent material expression to varied imaginations and interpretations of modernity in Chinese literature of the early twentieth century. The aim of the project is to offer new methods of reading an expanded corpus of modern Chinese literature, encompassing not only major authors such as Liang Qichao and Lu Xun, but also a wide array of minor and marginalized writers, commentators, graphic artists, and print workers.
Xia earned her B.A. and M.A. in Chinese Literature from Fudan University and a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of California, Berkeley (with a designated emphasis in the Department of Film and Media). She has been a member of the Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School.