Wai-yee Li is the 1879 Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University, where she has taught since 2000. Li’s research spans topics ranging from early Chinese thought and narrative to late imperial Chinese literature and culture. Her recent and forthcoming publications include The Promise and Peril of Things: Literature and Material Culture in Late Imperial China (Columbia University Press, 2022), A Topsy-Turvy World: Short Plays and Farces from the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Columbia University Press, 2023), an annotated translation of The Peach Blossom Fan (Oxford University Press, 2024), Gender and Friendship in Chinese Literature (Brill, 2024), and The Confucius Chronicles (Columbia University Press, forthcoming). Li has received fellowships and grants from the Harvard Society of Fellows, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, ACLS, NEH, Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has taught courses on Ming-Qing culture and literature, early Chinese thought and historiography, gender and sexuality, and premodern fiction and drama. In 2014, Li was elected by Academia Sinica to its List of Academicians.

James Robson is Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. He has served as Director of Graduate Studies for the Regional Studies East Asia M.A. program. He teaches East Asian religions, in particular Daoism, Chinese Buddhism, and Zen. Robson received his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Stanford University in 2002, after spending many years doing research in China, Taiwan, and Japan. He specializes in the history of medieval Chinese Buddhism and Daoism and is particularly interested in issues of sacred geography, local religious history, talismans, and Chan/Zen Buddhism. He has been engaged in a long-term collaborative research project with the École Française d’Extrême-Orient studying local religious statuary from Hunan province. He is the author of Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak [Nanyue 南嶽] in Medieval China (Harvard, 2009), which was awarded the Stanislas Julien Prize for 2010 by the French Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres and the 2010 Toshihide Numata Book Prize in Buddhism. Robson is also the author of “Signs of Power: Talismanic Writings in Chinese Buddhism” (History of Religions 48:2), “Faith in Museums: On the Confluence of Museums and Religious Sites in Asia” (PMLA, 2010), and “A Tang Dynasty Chan Mummy [roushen] and a Modern Case of Furta Sacra? Investigating the Contested Bones of Shitou Xiqian.” His current research includes a long term project on the history of the confluence of Buddhist monasteries and mental hospitals in Japan.

Max L. Bohnenkamp is a scholar of modern Chinese literature and culture and a freelance translator specializing in Chinese scholarly writings in the Humanities and Social Sciences and fiction. He holds a PhD from the University of Chicago and has taught on Chinese literature, popular culture, and cinema at NYU, Harvard, and the University of Iowa. Bohnenkamp’s research focuses on the adaptation of Chinese folk culture for modern and contemporary literature, cinema, and performing arts, the reception of Western and Soviet theories of literary and dramatic aesthetics in China, and the relationship of creative expression to politics and critical social theory. He is currently completing a book-length study on the famous revolutionary drama The White-Haired Girl and his most recent translation is a collection of essays by Chinese scholars of religion, entitled Beyond Indigenization: Christianity and Chinese History in a Global Context, published in 2023.