Alexander C. Y. Huang

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature

Department of Comparative Literature
Pennsylvania State University

Research Affiliate, Literature
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

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Prof. Huang's teaching and publications (in English, Chinese, and German) focus on three principal areas: (1) modern literature, drama and film of China and the Chinese diaspora; (2) Shakespeare (connections between Renaissance dramas and 20th-century critical theory); and (3) the questions of race and nation in the space between imaginative writing and other forms of cultural production. He is a member of the Committee for Early Modern Studies.

He is the author of Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (Columbia University Press, 2009), a study of the interactions between ideas of "Shakespeare" and "China" in fiction, film, and theatre; co-editor of Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia and Cyberspace (Purdue University Press, 2009) and Class, Boundary and Social Discourse in the Renaissance (2007); and guest editor of a special issue of Asian Theatre Journal (forthcoming) and a film review cluster for Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation (forthcoming). He has contributed to MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, Shakespeare Yearbook, Shakespeare Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Shakespeare, The Shakespearean International Yearbook, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, China Review International, and Asian Theatre Journal, among other peer-reviewed journals and collections. His research has been supported by several institutions and grant agencies, including the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the China Times Cultural Foundation, the International Shakespeare Association (ISA), Folger Institute, Penn State's Institute for the Arts and Humanities (IAH), Stanford University, and other institutions.

In 2009, he will be the video curator of "Imagining China: The View from Europe, 1550-1700," an exhibition at the Folger Library (curated by Timothy Billings). To make performance videos a sharable resource for teaching and research, he has co-edited Shakespeare Performance in Asia, an online video archive and research project based at MIT that will be expanded to cover global Shakespeare performances.

Further projects underway include a book on humor, epistemology, and modern Chinese culture; a book on alterity and multilingual Shakespeares; a book on ethics and performance; and a collaborative research project on war-time Shakespeare. He has also participated in Cornell's Global Performing Arts Database (GloPAD) project and helped to create Stanford Shakespeare in Asia.

Dr. Huang holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (German, English, Chinese) and a Joint Ph.D. in Humanities from Stanford University.

[CV available upon request]