Géraldine Fiss

Ph.D. (Harvard University)

Associate Teaching Professor in Inter-Asia and Transpacific Studies: China Focus

Affiliated Faculty with Chinese Studies

Géraldine Fiss C.V.

Géraldine Fiss (許潔琳) is Associate Teaching Professor in Inter-Asia and Transpacific Studies: China Focus at the UC San Diego Department of Literature, where she is also currently serving as the Director of Doctoral Studies. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University and her B.A. in East Asian Languages and Literatures and German Literature and Culture Studies from Smith College. Her work lies at the intersection of modern Chinese and Sinophone literary, cultural, and film studies; comparative literature; women’s studies; and interdisciplinary studies in literature and the environment. She is interested in tracing the crosscultural nexus of forces that influences literary, cultural, and cinematic production in China and East Asia in the early modern, modern, and contemporary periods. In particular, her research illuminates the ways in which Chinese poets, writers, thinkers, and filmmakers synthesize modern Western (especially German) and non-Western impulses with classical Chinese aesthetics to create new, distinctly Chinese modern (and modernist) works and ideas. She is currently completing a book titled Chinese-German Encounters: Textual Travels and Traveling Texts in the Early Twentieth Century in which she examines empirical, fictional, poetic, and philosophical-aesthetic encounters between Chinese literati and German culture and ideas in late Qing and early Republican China (ca. 1875 to 1930). In addition, she focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese and Sinophone literature and cinema, and the trans-cultural influences that inform these literary, visual, and poetic modes. Simultaneously, she is also doing research on the Chinese New Documentary Film Movement, particularly contemporary women’s films, which often present a disruptive counter-discourse to the predominant cultural mainstream. She studies and teaches Chinese feminism and women’s literature; the genre of the fantastic in modern East Asian literature and film; and Chinese as well as East Asian ecocriticism, ecoliterature, and ecocinema. Throughout her work, she considers the continued impact and relevance of classical Chinese Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist thought upon modern and contemporary literature, culture, poetry, and film.

Fiss, Géraldine. “Black Night Consciousness and Ecofeminist Poetics in the Works of Zhai Yongming.” the Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, volume 76, no. 1, Spring 2022. 62-82.

“From Du Fu to Rilke and Back: Feng Zhi’s Modernist Aesthetics and Poetic Practice.” Chinese Poetic Modernisms. Brill, 2019. 38-56.

“Ding Ling’s Feminist Writings: New Women in Crisis of Subjectivity.” Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature. Routledge, 2019. 343-355.

“Münchhausen Travels to China: Xu Nianci Transforms a German Tale into Chinese Science Fiction.” A New Literary History of Modern China. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017. 196-201.

Co-editor with Li Guo. Frontiers of Literary Studies in China Special Issue Women, Writing and Visuality in Contemporary China, vol. 11, no. 1, 2017.

“Feminine and Masculine Dimensions of Feminist Thought and Transcultural Modernism in Republican China.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China Special Issue Nation, Gender and Transcultural Modernism in Republican China, vol. 8, no. 1, 2014. 101-125.

“Dismembering the New Woman: Expressionist Visuality and Literary Innovation in the Works of Mu Shiying.” Forthcoming in Transnational Modernism and Urban Conflict in the Interwar Era. Routledge.