{"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":"2026-01-23T13:29:36","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T18:29:36","slug":"zhuming-yao","status":"publish","type":"profile","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/profile\/zhuming-yao\/","title":{"rendered":"Zhuming Yao"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Zhuming Yao is a scholar of classical Chinese literature of the early and early imperial eras (ca. tenth century BCE \u2013 third century CE). He is particularly interested in the intersections of textual and literary criticism, of poetics and hermeneutics, and of book and literary history. In his research and teaching, Zhuming draws broadly from other literary traditions, aiming to foster dialogues between early Chinese studies and the larger field of comparative antiquity.<\/p>\n

Zhuming\u2019s current book project examines speech representation across early Chinese writings and offers an account of the underlying poetics of this prominent rhetorical exercise favored by poets, historians, and philosophers alike. The project highlights writing\u2019s role in constructing the discursive appeal of the oral form, an approach that reconceptualizes the relationship between writing and orality in early China.<\/p>\n

Zhuming\u2019s other interests include the philological \u201cremaking\u201d of classical Chinese literature. He takes a broad view of how literature goes through historical processes of reception, (re)organization, (re)interpretation, and (re)valuation. These philological efforts, broadly conceived, contribute to the continued relevance of classical Chinese literature but also exert changing pressure on what \u201cliterature\u201d and its related concepts mean and entail. For a representative work, see\u00a0<\/span>\u201cBeyond Authenticity: Genre, Rhetoric, and the Iterability of\u00a0<\/span>Shangshu<\/i>\u00a0Speeches,\u201d\u00a0<\/span>T\u2019oung Pao<\/i>\u00a0<\/span>110.3-4 (2024): 255-304.<\/a><\/p>\n

Before joining BU, Zhuming received his PhD from Princeton University (2023) and taught for a year at Swarthmore College. Outside of research, Zhuming translates scholarship for readers of Chinese and English. Some of the translations have appeared in\u00a0<\/span>Wenxue pinglun\u00a0<\/span><\/i>\u6587\u5b78\u8a55\u8ad6,\u00a0<\/span>Wen shi zhe\u00a0<\/span><\/i>\u6587\u53f2\u54f2,\u00a0<\/span>Bamboo and Silk<\/i>, and book series by <\/span>Sanlian shudian<\/i>\u00a0\u4e09\u806f\u66f8\u5e97 and\u00a0<\/span>Nanjing daxue chubanshe\u00a0<\/span><\/i>\u5357\u4eac\u5927\u5b78\u51fa\u7248\u793e<\/span>.<\/i><\/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":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/18416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19965,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/18416\/revisions\/19965"}],"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}]}}