Christopher Rosenmeier

Senior lecturer in Chinese

Biography

Background

Christopher Rosenmeier joined the University of Edinburgh in 2009. Before then, he was a Chiang Ching-kuo postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge University for two years. He completed his PhD in modern Chinese literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 2006. He graduated from the University of Copenhagen with a BA in Chinese with Mathematics (1998) and an MA in Chinese Studies (2001).

Christopher Rosenmeier and Natascha Gentz are the editors of the journal Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. For journal matters, please write to mclc@ed.ac.uk. Edinburgh University Press provides subscription information and online access.

Undergraduate teaching

Christopher teaches a number of undergraduate and postgraduate courses on modern Chinese literature and culture. He also gives lectures and tutorials on Chinese history, social developments, intellectual thought, etc.

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Current PhD students supervised

Hoi Yi Wong, Restricted Prosperity in the Literary Field in Chongqing: Wartime Poetry from 1939 to 1946

Kelsey Hanbing Tong, The Alienation of Cultural Hybridity: Rewriting Postcolonial Mirror Images in Eileen Chang and Somerset Maugham

Liu Yijun,  Political Leftists and Literary Liberalists: The Intersection and Detachment of New Sensationism and Realism (1922-1932)

Yi Fu, Left-Wing Decadents: The Unnamed Society and their Early Cultural Imagination of Russian Literature (1921-1931)

Past PhD students supervised

Chen Yiran, Supernatural Crossing in Republican Chinese Fiction

Ge Chunxu, A comparative study of the fiction of Charles Dickens and Zhang Tianyi

Liu Yixin, “Stream of Consciousness” and Feminist Poetics: A Study on the Works of Lu Yin and other Republican Women Writers

Ma Xuecong, The Crescent Moon School: The Poets, Poetry, and Poetics of a Modern Conservative Intellectual Group in Republican China.

Pan Chien-wei, After Hunger: Culinary Nostalgia in Taiwanese Literature and Culture, 1949-Present

Zou Li, Narrations of the human body in Chinese American diasporic literature set during the Second Sino-Japanese War

Research summary

Christopher Rosenmeier's research focuses on the literature of the Republican period (1912-1949), especially popular literature and the Shanghai modernist writers of the 1930s. He has looked at dynamics in the literary field and how some authors saw themselves as avant-garde at the time. This has resulted in several articles and a monograph on popular fiction during the Second Sino-Japanese War: On the Margins of Modernism: Xu Xu, Wumingshi, and Popular Chinese Literature in the 1940s (2017). His most recent study looks at Wang Xiaoyi, an exponent of the borderline erotic "literature of titillation" that was popular in the tabloids but which is wholly overlooked today. He is also interested in how tales of the supernatural in the 1930s and 40s echoed earlier ghost stories from the dynastic period.

Project activity

Christopher Rosenmeier is currently organizing a database with Brill, The Brill Guide to Chinese Literature, 1900-1949, based on the 4-volume reference work A Selective Guide to Chinese Literature, 1900-1949.

He coorganized the MCLC Video Lecture Series with Kirk A. Denton in 2020. This teaching resource offers some 50 lectures (about 15 minutes each) on various topics of Chinese literature, all provided by experts on their respective topics. Christopher covered "Wumingshi and Popular Fiction in the 1940s".

View all 15 publications on Research Explorer

Conference details

  • "Erotic Literature and its Discontents - The Case of Wang Xiaoyi", The European Association for Chinese Studies (EACS) Conference, Glasgow University, 2018.
  • “Wang Xiaoyi and the Literature and Titillation", The British Association for Chinese Studies (BACS) Conference, Glasgow University, 2017.
  • “Pirates, Ghosts, and Gypsies: Tales of Foreign Lands in Xu Xu's Popular Fiction of the 1940s”, Guest speaker, University of Manchester, 2017.
  • “Heroes of Korea in Wumingshi’s Wartime Fiction”, Dimensions of Mobility Workshop, University of Edinburgh, 2015.
  • “Poverty Policy and Its Local Implementations: An Exercise in Comparing Dibao Policy Across State Levels”, The British Association for Chinese Studies (BACS) Conference, University of Edinburgh, 2011.
  • “The Politics of Mu Shiying’s Nanbeiji”, Encounters and Transformations: Cultural Transmission and Knowledge Production in a Cross-Literary and Historical Perspective, 1850-1960, University of Cambridge, 2009.
  • Co-organizer of “Junior Scholars Conference on Modern Chinese Literature and Culture”, University of Cambridge, 2009.
  • “The New Woman Stereotype in the Fiction of Shi Zhecun”, Institute for Chinese Studies lecture series, Oxford University, 2008.
  • Co-organizer of “Southern England Conference on Chinese Literature”, University of Cambridge and SOAS, 2008.
  • “Echoes of Modernism in the Works of Xu Xu”, Translations and Transformations, University of Cambridge, Yale University and Tsinghua University, 2008.
  • “The Adaptation of Modernism into 1940s Popular Fiction - Two Novels by Wumingshi”, CRASSH workshop, University of Cambridge, 2008.
  • “Travels and Exoticism in Xu Xu’s Fiction in the 1930s and 1940s”, The Third International Junior Scholars’ Conference on Sinology, Suzhou University, 2005.
  • “Representations of Tradition in the Fiction of Shi Zhecun and Xu Xu”, Tradition and the Modern, University College, 2005.
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