Dora Zhang
Associate Professor
Research Areas
Biography
My research interests focus on Anglo-American and European modernist fiction, literature and philosophy, novel theory, affect theory, visual culture, and aesthetics. More recently, my worked has also turned to contemporary literature, especially Asian American and Asian diasporic literature.
My first book, Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel, appeared in 2020 from the University of Chicago Press as part of the "Thinking Literature" series. It turns to some experiments of modernist form in order to reinvigorate our thinking about the ubiquitous but still under-theoreized category of novelistic description. I have also written on topics including Proust and photography, Woolf and the philosophy of language, the role of atmospheres in everyday life, and Roland Barthes's travels in China.
Current projects include an essay on the detail and type in unmarked fiction (works that withhold some key information, e.g. gender or race, about their protagonists); and a new edited and annotated edition of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own, with an introduction, for the Norton Library, forthcoming in 2024.
Education
Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Princeton University
B.A., Philosophy, University of Toronto.
Books
