Sophie Volpp is professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature. She works in Chinese literature of the 16th through 19th centuries, and is the author of Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth-Century China (Harvard, 2011) and The Substance of Fiction: Literary Objects in China, 1550-1775 (Columbia, 2022). She has also translated the work of pre-modern women poets and dramatists. She is currently at work on two projects: a book about the efforts of the National Peiping Library (now the National Library of China) to preserve their rare book collection during the Sino-Japanese war, and a book about the figuration of referents in the eighteenth-century novel The Story of the Stone (Honglou meng) entitled The Stone and the World
Books Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth-Century China. Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2011. In progress: Substantive Fictions: Literary Objects of the Ming and Qing (1550-1750) Articles and book chapters “Seventeenth-Century Italian Scenographic Design and the Tongjing hua Paintings of Qianlong’s Private Theaters” in Qingdai xiqu yu gongting wenhua (Court Theater and Court Culture in the Qing Dynasty), ed. Zhu Wanshu, Shang Wei and Zhang Hongwei (Nanjing University Press, 2018), pp. 245-280. “The Vernacular Story and the Hiddenness of Value” in The Rhetoric of Hiddenness in Traditional Chinese Culture, ed. Paula Varsano (State University of New York Press, 2017), pp. 207-227. “Wu Lanzheng’s Jiang Heng Qiu.” Journal of Theater Studies vol. 2, no. 8 (July 2011): 113-138. “The Gift of a Python Robe: The Circulation of Objects in Jin Ping Mei,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 65, no. 1 (June 2005): 133-58. “Texts, Tutors and Fathers: Pedagogy and Pedants in Tang Xianzu’s Mudan ting” in Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation from the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond, ed. David Wang and Wei Shang, Harvard University Press (2005), pp. 25-62 “The Literary Circulation of Actors in Seventeenth-Century China.” Journal of Asian Studies vol. 61, no. 3 (Aug. 2002): 949-984. “Classifying Lust: The Seventeenth-Century Vogue for Male Love.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies vol. 65, no. 1 (June 2001): 77-118. “Gender, Power, and Spectacle in Late-Imperial China.” in Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures, ed. Petra Sabrina Ramet. Routledge, 1996. “A Male Mencius’s Mother: Li Yu’s Virtuous Woman.” positions: east asia cultures critique, vol.2, no.1 (Summer 1994): 113-131.