Liang Luo

Chair

Professor

Chinese: Politics of Performance, Folklore and Mythology, Popular Culture, The International Avant-Garde, Nationalism, Music and Literature

Liang Luo is Professor of Chinese studies and Chair of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at George Mason University. She holds a Ph.D. in East Asian languages and civilizations from Harvard University and an M.A. in comparative literature and world literature from Beijing Normal University. She has lived and studied in Chongqing, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Stockholm, Seoul, Canberra, Leiden, among other locations. She served on the Program Committee for the Associate for Asian Studies annual conference, as Chair of the Modern and Contemporary China Forum of the Modern Language Association, and as Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tianjin Normal University. She is on the board of the European Foundation Joris Ivens (Nijmegen, The Netherlands), serves as a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute of Folklore at East China Normal University, and is the President of the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature.

Current Research

Profound Propaganda: The International Avant-Garde and the Transformations of Modern China

Polyphonic Storytelling: Animating Heritage for Contemporary Life in the Age of Global Asias

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in East Asia (Co-edited multiple-volume project, Brill)

Literature and Modern China (Special issue on Global Asias)

Humanities (Co-edited special issue on “We the People”: Telling the Story of the US 250th in Fairy Tales, Folklore, and Myth)

Selected Publications

Books

The Global White Snake, University of Michigan Press, 2021.

《世界的白蛇》 (Translation of The Global White Snake in traditional Chinese characters), Joint Publishing, Hong Kong, September 2025.

《世界的白蛇》 (Translation of The Global White Snake in simplified Chinese characters), Fudan University Press, Shanghai, October 2025.

The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China, University of Michigan Press, 2014.

《先锋主义与流行文化》 (Chinese version of The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China), People's Literature Press, Beijing, October 2025.

Journal Special Issue

Comparative Literature & World Literature, “Global Asias” special issue, edited by Liang Luo, Vol. 10, No. 2 (December 2025, in print).

Recent articles and book chapters

“Introduction: Why Global Asias?,” Comparative Literature & World Literature, “Global Asias” special issue, edited by Liang Luo, Vol. 10, No. 2 (December 2025, in print), 1-9.

“Gender and Sexuality in Anglophone White Snake: The Malaysian and Singaporean Connections,” in Jamie J. Zhao and Hongwei Bao eds., Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender and Sexuality, Routledge, 2024, 115-130.

“The Digital Classicism of the Cantonese Opera Film White Snake,” in Zhiyi Yang and David Der-wei Wang eds., Classicism in Digital Times: Textual Production as Cultural Remembrance in the Sinophone Cyberspace, special issue of PRISM: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, vol. 20, no. 2 (September 2023), 442-461.

“The Experimental and the Popular in Chinese Socialist Theatre of the 1950s,” in Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era, edited by Xiaomei Chen, Siyuan Liu, and Tarryn Chun, University of Michigan Press, 2021, 135-161.

Expanded Publication List

Peer-Reviewed Book, Film, and Dissertation Reviews

Xiaolu Ma, Transpatial Modernity: Chinese Cultural Encounters with Russia via Japan (1880–1930), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2024. Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, vol. 22, issue 2 (2025), in print.

Kristin Ingrid Fryklund trans., The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons. University of Washington Press, 2021. Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), 43 (2021, published in 2023), 237-240.

Katherine Mezur and Emily Wilcox, eds., Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia. University of Michigan Press, 2020. Comparative Literature & World Literature, vol. 7, no. 1 (2022), 59-66 (longer version).

Katherine Mezur and Emily Wilcox, eds., Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia. University of Michigan Press, 2020. International Quarterly for Asian Studies (IQAS), vol. 53, no. 1 (2022), 147-152, https://doi.org/10.11588/iqas.2022.1.19014 (shorter version).

Nanxiu Qian, Richard J. Smith, and Bowei Zhang eds. Reexamining the Sinosphere: Cultural Transmissions and Transformations in East Asia and Rethinking the Sinosphere: Poetics, Aesthetics, and Identity Formation. Cambria Sinophone World Series. Amherst, New York: Cambria Press, 2020. China Review International, vol. 26, no. 3, 2019 (published in 2021), 190-197.

Yu Zhang, Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915- 1965. University of Michigan Press, 2020. Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 80, issue 4, November 2021, 1089-1091.

Hui Faye Xiao, Youth Economy, Crisis, and Reinvention in Twenty-First-Century China. Routledge, 2020. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright December 2021).

Emily Wilcox, Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and Socialist Legacy. University of California Press, 2018. Twentieth-Century China, vol 46, no. 3 (October 2021), E-36-E-38.

Duo Duo, Words as Grain: New and Selected Poems. Translated from the Chinese and edited by Lucas Klein. Yale University Press, 2021. “Cha Review of Books and Films,” in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, September 16, 2021.

Maggie Greene, Resisting Spirits: Drama Reform and Cultural Transformation in the People’s Republic of China. China Understandings Today Series. University of Michigan Press, 2019. Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 80, no. 3 (August 2021), 716-718.

Carlos Rojas ed., Method as Method, special issue of Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, vol. 16, no. 2 (October 2019). “Theories, Methods, Objects, and Localities: A Review of Method as Method,” Cha Review of Books and Films, in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, issue 46, January 15, 2021.

Brian James DeMare, Mao’s Cultural Army: Drama Troupes in China’s Rural Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Review of Mao’s Cultural Army with a response from the author, in The PRC History Review Book Review Series, No. 7, July 2019, published by The PRC History Group.

Amp Wong 黃家康 and Zhao Ji 趙霽 dirs.,《白蛇: 緣起》(White Snake: Origins) (Light Chaser Animation and Warner Bros., 2019), “Queering an Icon, Becoming a Demon: A Review of White Snake: Origins,” published by the Association for Chinese Animation Studies (Hong Kong), June 24, 2019.

Xiaomei Chen, Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film, and the Afterlives of Propaganda (Columbia University Press, 2016), in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, No. 40 (December 2018), 249-252.

Haiyan Lee, The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination (Stanford University Press, 2014), in The Journal of Asian Studies, published by the Association for Asian Studies, Vol. 77, No. 4 (November 2018), 1074-1076.

Li Wei 李偉,《20 世紀戲曲改革的三大範式 (Three Paradigms of Reforming Traditional Theater in the 20th Century) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2014), in CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, published by Maney Publishing, Vol. 36, No. 2 (2017), 139-144.

Liana Chen 陳凱莘,《從案頭到氍毹:〈牡丹亭〉明清文人之詮釋改編與舞台藝術之遞進》 (Literati and Actors at Work: The Transformations of Peony Pavilion on Page and on Stage in the Ming and Qing Dynasties) (National Taiwan University Press, Taiwan, 2013), in Chinese Literature Today, published by the University of Oklahoma Press, vol. 6, no. 1 (2017), 141-142.

Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl and Dorothy Ko eds., The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational History (Columbia University Press, 2013), in Comparative Literature and World Literature, published by Beijing Normal University Press, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2017), 76-79.

Mary Mazzilli, Gao Xinjian’s Post-Exile Plays: Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre (Bloomsbury, 2015), in Modern Drama, published by University of Toronto Press, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Winter 2016), 512-515.

Shengqing Wu, Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition, 1900- 1937 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014), in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 75, No. 1 (February 2016), published by the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), 227-9.

Zhiguang Yin, Politics of Art: The Creation Society and the Practice of Theoretical Struggle in Revolutionary China (Brill, 2014). Review of Politics of Art, MCLC Resource Center Publications (Copyright December 2015).

Andrea S. Goldman, Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing, 1770-1900 (Stanford University Press, 2012), in The China Review (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring 2014), 239-242.

Valerie M. Levan, “Forbidden Enlightenment: Self-Articulation and Self-Accusation in the Works of Yu Dafu (1896-1945)” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2010). Review of “Forbidden Enlightenment,” in Dissertation Reviews, April 22, 2013.

Andrew F. Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Harvard University Press, 2011), in American Journal of Play, winter 2013, 266-267.

Hong Zicheng, A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, translated by Michael M. Day, (Brill, 2007), in China Review International, vol. 16, no. 4, 2011, 517-521.

Jin Jiang, Women Playing Men: Yue Opera and Social Change in Twentieth Century Shanghai (University of Washington Press, 2009), in China Review International, vol. 16, no. 1, 2009, 117-125.

Xiaolu Guo, The Concrete Revolution (Choices Inc., 2006, DVD), in Education About Asia, published by the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), vol. 2, no. 2, Fall 2007, 69-70.

Grants and Fellowships

Fall 2024- Henry Luce Foundation-funded pedagogical workshop on Southeast Asian and Appalachian Studies, with performance from the AppalAsia music group, co-sponsored by the East-West Center (Hawaii), and many more

Summer 2024 Henry Luce Foundation-funded Summer Institute on Modern Southeast Asia, East-West Center, Hawaii

2021-2022 Reapplied and renewed the Korea Foundation grant to support the hiring of a part-time instructor and the continued offering of four Korean language courses at the University of Kentucky

2020-2021 Received a Korea Foundation grant to support the hiring of a part-time instructor and the opening of four Korean language courses at the University of Kentucky, renewable

Spring 2018 Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award, A&S, UKY

Spring 2018 Office of the Vice President for Research, Research and Creative Activities Grant, UKY

Spring 2018 Student Government Association Student Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion, Inclusivity Award, UKY

Summer 2017 Visiting fellowship at the Humanities Research Center, ANU

2016-2017 Teacher Who Made a Difference Award, College of Education, UKY

Summer 2016 Research fellowship at the International Center for the Studies of Chinese Civilization, Fudan University

2014-2015 Full-year research Professorship at the Ewha Institute for the Humanities, National Research Foundation of Korea

Summer 2013 CELT Innovation + Design Lab Fellowship, UKY Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching (CELT)

Summer 2010 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar Stipend

Courses Taught

CHIN 325/FRLN 550 Science Fiction in Context, Spring 2026

Education

Ph.D. East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, 2006

M.A. Comparative Literature and World Literature, Beijing Normal University, 1999

B.A. Chinese Language and Literature, Beijing Normal University, 1997

Recent Presentations

Invited public lecture, “Global White Snake as Digital Activist Project,” delivered at Vassar College, hosted by Professors Fusheng Su and Yu Zhou, February 9, 2026. Invited class discussion for the “Chinatowns” course, taught by Professor Ashanti Shih, Vassar College, February 10, 2026.

Invited keynote lecture at the “The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China Chinese Edition” symposium, College of Chinese Language and Literature, Hunan University, January 19, 2026 (online, in Chinese).

Invited speaker at the talkback session after “Qing Bai: Innocence,” an original Chinese-language play with English subtitles, performed at HERE Arts Center, New York, December 13, 2025.

Invited keynote at book workshop, “The Media Transformation and Transgressive Travels of Legend of the White Snake,” College of Literature, Beijing Normal University, hosted by Professor Bai Huiyuan, November 28, 2025 (in Chinese).

Invited public lecture, “Animating Classics: Poetry Recitation and Corporal Empathy in Chang An,” Hangzhou Normal University, November 27, 2025 (in Chinese).

Invited book talk, “The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China Chinese Edition Book Launch,” Library of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, hosted by Professor Qu Bo, November 26, 2025 (hybrid, in Chinese).

Invited lecture, “The Global White Snake: Power of Transgression and Regeneration,” Department of Chinese, The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, November 7, 2025 (online, in Chinese).

Invited lecture, “The Global White Snake Chinese Edition Book Launch,” University of Hong Kong, 4:30 to 6 pm, September 29, 2025 (in Chinese).

Invited lecture, “The Global White Snake: Power of Transgression and Regeneration,” Global China Humanities Lecture, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 1:30 to 3 pm, September 29, 2025 (in Chinese).

Invited book talk, “The Global Travels of the White Snake Legend,” Joint Publishing Bookstore, Wanchi, Hong Kong, September 27, 2025 (in Chinese).

Invited keynote speaker for “Tian Han in Southwest China: Theory and Practice,” Yunan Arts University, Kunming, Yunnan, September 25-26, 2025 (in Chinese).

Invited keynote speaker for “Chinese Mythology in the Digital Age,” organized by the Research Institute for Digital Culture and Humanities (RIDCH) at Hong Kong Metropolitan University, August 1-2, 2025.

Invited lecture, “Tian Han’s Early Artistic Journey,” School of Arts, Chongqing University, hosted by Professor Xiaoyu Yang, June 13, 2025 (in Chinese).

Invited discussion, “Academic Exchange and International Cooperation,” School of Arts, Chongqing University, hosted by Professor Xiaoyu Yang, June 13, 2025 (in Chinese).

"Imagining a Global Asias Curriculum,” presented at this Verge-sponsored roundtable, the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) annual conference, Columbus, Ohio, March 13-16, 2025.

“Designing an Innovative Curriculum for Global Asias,” presenting at this roundtable for the “Global Asias” Conference, University of California, Irvine, February 20-21, 2025.

Invited keynote address for “Building Bridges Across Cultures,” a student panel for “Global UK: Celebrating Our Campus Mosaic,” a two-day celebration of UK’s rich, international population, co-sponsored by the UK International Center, UK College of Arts and Sciences, UK College of Fine Arts and UK Residence Life, September 26, 2024.

“The Many Languages and Many Genders of ‘The White Snake’ on Contemporary Stage in Malaysia and Singapore,” presented at the roundtable, “Multilingual Research and Gendered Analysis in China Studies in the Age of Global Asias,” Association for Asian Studies in Asia Conference, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, July 9-11, 2024.

“History and Theater, Humanity and War in Tian Han’s 1948 play Storms over Korea,” presented at “‘People’s Literature’ and Its Transformations in the Twentieth Century,” Association for Chinese and Comparative Literature conference, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, May 24, 2024 (in Chinese).

“Chang An: Tang Poetry, Homosociality, and Animating Classics for Contemporary Life,” presented at “Global Sinophone Classicisms: Hybridity, Agency, and Critical Challenges,” a workshop organized by Professors Zhiyi Yang and David Der-wei Wang, Goethe University of Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany, May 10, 2024.

“Soundtracks of the Everyday in War, Revolution, and the Reform Era,” presented at the panel “Left-Wing Internationalism and China in Transmedia Forms: Theatre, Telecommunication and Documentary Soundtrack,” for the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) annual conference, Seattle, WA, March 14-17, 2024.

In the Media

Liang Luo Gives "The Global White Snake as Digital Activist Project" Lecture at Vassar College, February 8, 2026 / News Article, Modern and Classical Languages

Three New Books Published by Professor Liang Luo in September and October 2025, November 13, 2025 / News Article, Modern and Classical Languages

From Marvel to George Mason: Meet the new modern and classical languages chair, September 15, 2025 / By Shayla Brown.

Invited interview on White Snake: Afloat 白蛇: 浮生 (Light Chaser Animation, release date: August 10, 2024) at China Movie Channel, July 19, 2024 (in Chinese, aired on CCTV6 on July 22, 2024).