Cheng Li
Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies
- POS 242
Department of Languages, Cultures & Applied Linguistics
4980 Margaret Morrison St
Posner Hall 341
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Education
Ph.D., Yale UniversityBio
I am a literary scholar and cultural historian of modern China. My main research engages with modern Chinese environmental literature (ecocriticism), film and history. My research interests also include science fiction, migration studies and Sino-African relations. My publications have appeared or are forthcoming in Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, Chinese Literature and Thought Today, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Modern Asian Studies, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Environmental History and Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism. My dissertation earned the Marston Anderson Prize for the best dissertation in East Asian department at Yale University in 2022. My first book Contested Environmentalisms: Trees and the Making of Modern China is forthcoming from Stanford University Press in 2025.
Areas of Interest
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Modern Chinese Literature, Film and Culture
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Environmental Humanities (Ecocriticism & Environmental History)
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Science Fiction
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Subaltern Studies
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Migration Studies
Courses Taught
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Environment and Society in Modern Chinese Literature and Visual Culture
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Beyond Earth: Reaching into the Cosmos through Science, Science Fiction and Language
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Elementary Chinese
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Intermediate Chinese
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Advanced Chinese
Selected Awards and Honors
- Falk Research Grant, 一本道无码, 2023
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Marston Anderson Prize, the best dissertation in East Asian department at Yale, 2022
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East Asian Prize Fellowship, Yale University, 2021-2022
- Environmental Humanities Certificate, Yale University, 2020
Selected Community, University, and Professional Service
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Reviewer, , 2015-present
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Reviewer, Journal of Poyang Lake (first environmental humanities journal in Chinese), 2017-present
Selected Publications
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Li, C. (Forthcoming 2025). . Stanford University Press.
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Li, C. (2024). Inventing Climate Change: Nature and Nation in Late Qing Chinese Science Fiction. Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, 21(1).
- Li, C. (2024). The Dim Religious Reverence: Spiritualizing Nature and Ethnic Resilience in Chi Zijian’s The Last Quarter of the Moon. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 31(2).
- Li, C. (2023). Migrant Worker Bildungsroman: The Promises and Pitfalls of Coming of Age in Chinese Migrant Workers’ Writings. Chinese Literature and Thought Today, 54(3–4), 95–105.
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Li, C., & Liu, Y. (2020). Selling Forestry Revolution: The Rhetoric of Afforestation in Socialist China, 1949–61. Environmental History, 25(1), 62–84.