Judith T. Zeitlin

Who is Judith T. Zeitlin?

Judith T. Zeitlin is a professor in Chinese literature and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her areas of interest are Ming-Qing literary and cultural history, with specialties in the classical tale and drama.

She describes her personal interests on her academic page at the University of Chicago as follows:

I’m especially interested in combining literary concerns with other disciplines, such as visual and material culture, medicine, performance, music, and film. I have two books coming out next year, both coming out from the University of Hawaii Press in 2007. The first, called The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature explores the representation of ghosts across the range of literary genres in the late Ming and early Qing, specifically the fantasy of a female corpse revived through love, the imagination of death through a ghostly poetic voice, the mourning of the historical past by the present, and the theatricality of the split between body and soul.