Short Biography

Harlan Chambers completed his Ph.D. in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at Columbia University in 2022 and served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Illinois Wesleyan University before joining the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Göttingen in 2024. As an interdisciplinary scholar of Chinese culture and history, as well as feminist and critical theory, his research interrogates the role of cultural practices in processes of social transformation, integrating archival research with analyses of cultural texts. He is currently developing his dissertation into a book-length project, Narrative Economies: Cultural Practice and the Economic Imagination of China’s Revolution, 1939-1976, examining how cultural creators used narrative practice to reshape the economic foundations of the nascent People’s Republic of China (PRC), from the Second World War through the late Cultural Revolution. He argues that revolutionary cultural experiments opened channels for popular participation in reshaping and contesting how the economy was conceived and practiced, contributing to a critical, socialist economics.

As part of a research team exploring the history of conceptions of world order at the University of Göttingen, Harlan will interrogate internationalist cultural experiments in world-making.These include aesthetic and theoretical projects related to the League of Leftwing Writers, guerrilla warfare and economic construction, and cultural efforts to reimagine China’s place in the world amidst crises of the 1930. Harlan is also examining internationalist aesthetic debates of the early People’s Republic of China, particularly their relation to questions of socialist transition. This builds upon a series of workshops that he previously co-organized and hopes to continue developing at Göttingen, “Chinese Socialism in/as Theory: Political Economy in Revolutionary China.” In addition to peer-reviewed scholarship in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, he has translated or co-translated works by Wang Hui, Li Tuo, Zhang Jishun, and the contemporary artist Cao Fei, for positions: Asia Critique, Modern China, and The South Atlantic Quarterly.