Ying Wang

Ying Wang came to Mount Holyoke College after a teaching circuit that included Beijing Language and Culture University, Smith College, McGill University, Princeton University and Middlebury College.

Wang is specialized in the fields of Chinese language and literature and has authored three Chinese language textbooks, a play translation and numerous research articles on Ming and Qing vernacular fiction as well as translation of classical Chinese drama. She is also one of the editors for two Chinese linguistic and pedagogical volumes. Her recent scholarship includes the nineteenth-century imitation and adaptation of The Story of the Stone in fiction and the performing arts (such as ballad and theater art), Li Yu’s seventeenth-century chuanqi plays and the theoretical concerns and practical strategies of translating classical Chinese drama into English.

In her publications, Wang explores how rewriting, as a response to literary models of the past, became the fundamental dynamic of textual production for innovation and iconoclasm in Chinese fiction in the nineteenth century and how adaptation in performing arts played a vital role in dissemination of the eighteenth-century masterpiece, The Story of the Stone, at the turn of the twentieth century. Wang’s translation of Li Yu’s play, The Fragrant Companion, introduces English readers and audiences to one of the most important pre-modern Chinese literary pieces on female-same-sex love and is praised to be “a tremendous achievement.”

Wang is similarly active in the field of Chinese language pedagogy. Wang is the founder of the MHC-CSI Summer Intensive Chinese Program at Peking University and she also helped with launching the MHC spring abroad program at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.

Wang teaches a wide variety of Chinese language and literature courses, including a 300-level seminar on The Story of the Stone, a 200-level course on traditional Chinese drama and Yue Opera, a first-year seminar on representative works of modern Chinese literature and a 200-level course on Chinese women writers.