Chinese Studies Teaching Staff
Dr Susan Daruvala
Contact Information
Email: sfd21@cam.ac.uk
Tel: 01223 335149
Current Position
Senior Lecturer in Modern Chinese Literature
Biographical Details
In 1968, I decided to study Chinese at Leeds University for my undergraduate degree because Leeds had an area studies programme designed to provide training in Chinese and a discipline, taken as a minor subject. I was interested in the divergent political and economic paths taken by China and India, and wanted to understand as much as possible about China. I took sociology as my minor. In 1974 I graduated with an MPhil in Politics with special reference to China from SOAS. I then applied at the Chinese Embassy for a two-year job teaching English—one of the few ways of getting to China at the time—and was sent to Shanghai in August 1975. The next two years were demanding and engrossing, as they were divided in 1976 by Mao’s death and the arrest of radical leaders with their political base in Shanghai, bringing to an end the Cultural Revolution. I lived and worked in Hong Kong between 1977 and 1982, followed by 18 months in India. In 1985 I began graduate studies at the University of Chicago, specializing in literature, as it now seemed to me that literature offered richer insights into issues such as authority, tradition and so on, than political science. I spent 1991-93 in Taiwan, and then moved back to the UK. After a short stint teaching at the University of Westminster, I came to Cambridge in 1995.
Educational Details
| 1973 | BA in Chinese Studies, University of Leeds |
| 1974 | M.Sc in Politics with special reference to China, SOAS |
| 1986 | MA in Chinese Literature, University of Chicago |
| 1993 | PhD University of Chicago |
Research Interests
20th century Chinese literature; the modern Chinese essay; Chinese literary aesthetics; Zhou Zuoren; modernity, nation and identity; intellectual discourses in modern China; the literary field in Republican China; Republican journal publishing; Chinese film
Publications
"The aesthetics and moral politics of Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town", Journal of Chinese Cinemas Vol. 1, No 3 pp. 169-185. October 2007.
"Yuefeng: A Literati Journal of the 1930s", Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Fall 2006, Vol. 18 No. 2, pp. 39-97.
Review of Charles Laughlin, Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience online at Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Centre http://www.mclc.osu.edu October 2004.
"Selections from Chu shi tai xi ji [Record of the First Diplomatic Mission to the West] by Zhigang" in Renditions No 53/54 (Spring and Autumn 2000) jointly translated with S. K. Church. pp. 55-61.
Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity. Harvard East Asian Monographs: 189. Harvard University Press, 2000. 361pp.
Review of Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker Ideology, Power Text: Self-Representation and the Peasant Other in China Quarterly No. 160 (December 1999), 1088-1090.
Review of Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity, 1900-1937 in BSOAS, vol 61 (1998) part 1: 182.
Current Projects
My current research is focussed on the literary and intellectual fields in Republican China. In a forthcoming article on the rediscovery of the 17th century figure Wang Siren, I illustrate the filiation between the informal essay as published in "old-style" popular literary journals in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s and the late Ming essay invoked by Zhou Zuoren. Class and regional identities were important but often overlooked factors in the constitution of these fields. With a better understanding of the contours of literary culture, including the place of the popular within it, I have found it natural to expand my interests to film. I have projects underway on the Nationalist literary movement, and on Li Changzhi's attempt to formulate a critique of Lu Xun, based on Kantian aesthetics.
