Zihan Guo 郭子菡 is a Ph.D. student in premodern Chinese literature, focusing on the interplay of the literary, the alimentary, and the material.

Her MA thesis at Penn (2022) focuses on the polysemous word “taste” as both a sensory experience and an aesthetic criterion in Song Dynasty (960-1279) poetics. Literati taste elevated enduring blandness over transient lusciousness, philosophical profundity over lush rhetoric. At Princeton, she continues to explore how writers experienced the interface between the self and the world, acquired and deployed miscellaneous knowledge of food and medicine, and how literature embodied an ethical ideal of cultivating one's whole being and attending to one's connections with the world. 

Her other interests include travel writing, landscape poetry, food studies, history of science and technology, and history of emotion.