{"id":18416,"date":"2024-06-27T12:49:12","date_gmt":"2024-06-27T16:49:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/?post_type=profile&p=18416"},"modified":"2026-09-03T10:47:55","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T14:47:55","slug":"zhuming-yao","status":"publish","type":"profile","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/profile\/zhuming-yao\/","title":{"rendered":"Zhuming Yao"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fall 2026 Office Hours: Tuesdays 2:00-4:00, Thursdays 1:00-2:00, and by appointment.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I work on classical Chinese literature of the early and early imperial eras (ca. tenth century BCE \u2013 third century CE). I am broadly interested in poetics, hermeneutics, manuscript culture, and comparative antiquity. Questions that particularly motivate my work are how texts acquire meaning, how meaning is constructed and negotiated over time, and how antiquity plays into later imaginations of the self and the world. These questions have led me to a broad range of genres and materials, from both the received and the excavated traditions.<\/p>\n

My current book project, A World in Words: Speech, Writing, and \u201cSpeech Writings\u201d in Early China<\/em> looks at the prominence of speech representation across early Chinese writings and offers an account of the underlying poetics of the fascination with speech on the part of poets, historians, philosophers, among other specialized writers. It shows how speech afforded writing in early China a way to not merely reflect what the world was like but project and model a world imagined, inherited, and reimagined by generations of writers. This world-making instead of world-reflecting mimesis, I argue, gives us an early China full of constructed figures, voices, and stories the tradition takes for granted.<\/p>\n

My other works have appeared in or are forthcoming from T\u2019oung Pao, Asia Major, Early China<\/em>, and Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture<\/em>. Besides research, I translate scholarship for readers of Chinese and English. Some of the translations can be found in Wenxue pinglun<\/em> \u6587\u5b78\u8a55\u8ad6, Wen shi zhe<\/em> \u6587\u53f2\u54f2, Bamboo and Silk<\/em>, as well as books published by Sanlian shudian <\/em>\u4e09\u806f\u66f8\u5e97 and Nanjing daxue chubanshe<\/em> \u5357\u4eac\u5927\u5b78\u51fa\u7248\u793e.<\/p>\n

Before joining BU, I received my PhD from Princeton University in 2023 and taught for a year as Visiting Assistant Professor of Chinese at Swarthmore College. At BU, I am affiliated with the Department of Classical Studies and the Program in Global Medieval Studies.<\/p>\n

Recent Publications:<\/p>\n

\u201cIrony, \u2018Staged Discourse,\u2019 and Early Imperial Political Rhetoric.\u201d Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture<\/em>, forthcoming.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnits, Assemblages, Compilations: The \u2018Composite Nature of Early Chinese Texts\u2019 Reconsidered.\u201d Early China<\/em>, forthcoming.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Early Chinese Lyric \u2018I\u2019: Between Poetics and Hermeneutics.\u201d Asia Major<\/em>, 3rd ser. 38.1 (2025): 31\u201373.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cBeyond Authenticity: Genre, Rhetoric, and the Iterability of Shangshu Speeches.\u201d T\u2019oung Pao<\/em> 110 (2024): 255-304.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23940,"template":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/18416"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/profile"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23940"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/18416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20955,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/18416\/revisions\/20955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}