Short Biography

Dingru Huang is the Rumsey Family Junior Professor in the Humanities and the Arts at the Department of International Literary and Cultural Studies, Tufts University. Before joining Tufts, she was at the University of California, Berkeley, as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies. Dingru received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. Her research interests include wartime cultural production, science fiction, and environmental humanities in Global East Asia, particularly the roles played by nonhuman animals. Her scholarly work has been published or is forthcoming in Ex-position, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Chung-wai Literary Quarterly, and Comparative Literature in China. Aside from academic research, Dingru enjoys writing short stories in Chinese. Her stories about animals have appeared in Shanghai Literature and UNITAS.  

Project

Zoopoetics in Global China

At the Worldmaking Fellowship Program, I will be working on my first book manuscript, “Between Animal and Machine: Ecologizing Modernisms in Wartime China, 1931-1945.” Based upon my dissertation, this book project delves into the ways in which Chinese, Japanese, and American writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals mobilized cultural techniques to confront the expansion of Japanese imperialism in wartime China, and sought to redefine the human condition in relations to animals and machines. In dialogue with the existing scholarship which tends to stress human factors in wartime cultural production, I propose an ecological approach to explore how nonhuman actors, exerting impact in intertwined symbolic, historical, and material terms, significantly shaped the transnational networks of twentieth-century Chinese literature and media. In addition to well-known literary and cinematic texts from across divided geopolitical regions, this book project discusses overlooked materials from China and Japan, such as popular science writings, cartoons, and memoirs. It aims to uncover the neglected nexuses that connect cultural production, technological development, and ecological imaginations. 

While at Heidelberg University, I would also like to share with colleagues in the program my on-going research for a second book project, “Zoopoetics in Global China,” which expands the temporal and spatial scopes of my previous work. I will trace the genealogies of relations between human and nonhuman species by examining recurring themes in Sinophone literature and media from the turn of the twentieth century to today. Case studies range from early twentieth-century intellectuals, who evoke animals in the frameworks of evolution, enlightenment, and nationhood, to contemporary global Chinese writers, who place animals at the center of their explorations of colonial memories, diasporic experiences, identity politics, and shared concerns with environmental crises.