Position Title
Lecturer in Chinese
Profile
Xuesong Shao is a Lecturer in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Davis. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory from UC Davis in 2024 and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Chinese Studies at National University of Singapore in 2024–25. Working at the intersection of literature, media, and history, her research combines archival work with textual analysis, engaging with current debates on media and mediation, revolutionary culture, materialism and materiality, and peripheral realism. Her current book project, Forming Contradictions: The Agrarian Question and Its Cultural Mediations in the People’s Republic of China, probes the pivotal role of the rural in articulating lived and perceived contradictions in Mao’s China and after. Untangling the “obsession with rural China” vis-à-vis evolving political and aesthetic orientations since 1942, this study conceptualizes and contextualizes Chinese rurality both within and against capitalist modernity. Xuesong is also developing a second project on the cultural politics of the late Cultural Revolution, focusing on questions of revolutionary temporality, dialectical storytelling, and socialist worldmaking.
Publications
Peer-reviewed Journal Articles and Book Chapters
"Writing the New Person in the People's Republic of China" in The Routledge Handbook of Red World Literature. Routledge, 2026. (forthcoming)
(In Chinese) 寻找正确的道路——《创业史》与《人生》中的农村青年问题 [Seeking the Right Path: The Question of Rural Youth in The Builders and Life]. International Comparative Literature 8(4) 2025: 109–126.
“Politics of Vision: Storytelling and Staring in Cut Out the Eyes.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas, November 25, 2024.
“Seeking the Right Path: The Question of Rural Youth in Modern Chinese Literature, 1950s–1980s.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 51.1 (March 2024): 117–133.
“Reconfiguring the Chronotope: Temporal and Spatial Representations of Beijing in Mr. Six,” co-authored with Sheldon Lu. Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 19.1 (March 2022): 67–85.
“Restoring and Reimagining Socialist-Built Cities: Wang Xiaoshuai’s ‘Third Front Trilogy.'" Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 197 (Winter 2021): 13–33.
“Transnational Chinese Cinemas.” co-authored with Sheldon Lu. Oxford Bibliographies in Chinese Studies, November 2020.
Book Reviews
(In Chinese) Review of Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915–1965, by Yu Zhang. University of Michigan Press, 2020. Literature 20 (2026). (forthcoming)
Review of Fighting on the Cultural Front: U.S.-China Relations in the Cold War, by Hongshan Li. Columbia University Press, 2024. Journal of Asian Studies 85.3 (2026): 719–721.
- Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, University of California, Davis
- M.A in East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Massachusetts Amherst
- M.A. in American Literature and Culture, Wuhan University
- B.A in English, Wuhan University
- Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, 2023–2024
- University of California Provost’s Dissertation Year Fellowship, 2022–2023
- Best Student Paper Prize, Western Conference of Association for Asian Studies, 2022
- CHN 10: Modern Chinese Literature in Translation
- CHN 101/CTS147A: Chinese Film
- CHN 104: Modern Chinese Fiction
- CHN 107: Traditional Chinese Fiction
- CHN 109H: Chinese Popular Culture
- COM 4: Major Works of the Contemporary World
- Realism in Modern Chinese Literature, Film, and Art (Graduate Seminar at National University of Singapore)
- Chinese literature and film; documentary studies; the agrarian question and rural culture; materialism and materiality; the global 1970s; Third Worldism