Carnegie Mellon University
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Cheng Li

Cheng Li

Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies

  • POS 242
Address
Department of Languages, Cultures & Applied Linguistics
4980 Margaret Morrison St
Posner Hall 341
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Education

Ph.D., Yale University

Bio

I am a literary scholar and cultural historian of modern China. My main research engages with modern Chinese environmental literature (ecocriticism), film and history. My research interests also include science fiction, migration studies and Sino-African relations. My publications have appeared or are forthcoming in Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, Chinese Literature and Thought Today, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Modern Asian Studies, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Environmental History and Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism. My dissertation earned the Marston Anderson Prize for the best dissertation in East Asian department at Yale University in 2022. My first book Contested Environmentalisms: Trees and the Making of Modern China is forthcoming from Stanford University Press in 2025.

  • Modern Chinese Literature, Film and Culture

  • Environmental Humanities (Ecocriticism & Environmental History)

  • Science Fiction

  • Subaltern Studies

  • Migration Studies

  • Environment and Society in Modern Chinese Literature and Visual Culture

  • Beyond Earth: Reaching into the Cosmos through Science, Science Fiction and Language

  • Elementary Chinese

  • Intermediate Chinese

  • Advanced Chinese

     

  • Falk Research Grant, Carnegie Mellon University, 2023

  • Marston Anderson Prize, the best dissertation in East Asian department at Yale, 2022

  • East Asian Prize Fellowship, Yale University, 2021-2022

  • Environmental Humanities Certificate, Yale University, 2020

  • Li, C. (Forthcoming 2025). Contested Environmentalisms: Trees and the Making of Modern China. Stanford University Press.

  • Li, C. (2024). Inventing Climate Change: Nature and Nation in Late Qing Chinese Science Fiction. Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, 21(1).

  • Li, C. (2024). The Dim Religious Reverence: Spiritualizing Nature and Ethnic Resilience in Chi Zijian’s The Last Quarter of the Moon. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 31(2). https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isac049
  • Li, C. (2023). Migrant Worker Bildungsroman: The Promises and Pitfalls of Coming of Age in Chinese Migrant Workers’ Writings. Chinese Literature and Thought Today, 54(3–4), 95–105. https://doi.org/10.1080/27683524.2023.2264168

  • Li, C., & Liu, Y. (2020). Selling Forestry Revolution: The Rhetoric of Afforestation in Socialist China, 1949–61. Environmental History, 25(1), 62–84. https://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emz081

Department Member Since 2022