Shiamin Kwa

Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Eugenia Chase Guild Chair in the Humanities
Shiamin Kwa headshot

Contact

Phone 610-526-5671
Location Old Library 127
Office Hours
Friday 8:00am-12:00pm
On Leave
semester I

Education

Ph.D. Harvard University.
M.A. Harvard University.
B.A. Dartmouth College.

Areas of Focus

Issues of translation, adaptation, and global circulation in narrative fiction and theatrical performance

Biography

Shiamin Kwa is Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at 91传媒. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Chinese Literature from Harvard University and her B.A. in English Literature from Dartmouth College. Her written work explores relationships between form and content, text and image, self and self-presentation, surface and depth, and the conflicts between what we say and what we mean. Her research interests include theater and fiction, food studies, graphic narratives, literary studies, cultural studies, comparative and world literature, and literary and narrative theory. She is the author of  (with Wilt Idema, 2010),  (2013),  (2020), and  (2023). Her published articles analyze a broad variety of topics, including Italian opera, contemporary Chinese literature, and North American and European graphic narratives. She has contributed essays for major reference works on world literature, Chinese drama, literary theory, and comic book studies. Her sabbatical research in 2019-2020 was supported by the American Philosophical Society. In 2019, she received 91传媒鈥檚 Rosalyn R. Schwartz Teaching Award.

To learn more about some of Kwa's courses, click on the links below:

Selected Articles:

  • 鈥淪ymmetry and the Quest for Justice in Leonardo Sciascia鈥檚 Il Consiglio d鈥橢gitto.鈥 Italica, 3 (2003): 353-370.
     
  • 鈥淭he Unbearable Lightness of Meaning in Verdi鈥檚 Rigoletto.鈥 The Verdi Forum, 30/31 (2004): 26-36.
     
  • 鈥淭he Shape of Things: Locating the Self in Xu Wei鈥檚 The Zen Master Yu Has a Voluptuous Dream鈥 in Text, Performance, and Gender in Chinese Literature and Music: Essays in Honor of Wilt Idema. 176-91. Ed. Maghiel van Crevel et al. Leiden: Brill, 2009.
     
  • 鈥淐omics at the Surface: Michael DeForge鈥檚 Ant Colony.鈥 Word & Image: a Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 32.4 (2016): 340-359.
     
  • 鈥淪till Moving: Gabrielle Bell鈥檚 Graphic Auto-fiction鈥 in Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women鈥檚 Literature: Thresholds in Women鈥檚 Writing. 247-263. Ed. Kristin J. Jacobson et al. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
     
  • 鈥淭he Common Place: The Poetics of the Pedestrian in Kevin Huizenga鈥檚 奥补濒办颈苍鈥鈥 in Comics and Sacred Texts: Reimagining Religion & Graphic Narratives. 232-248. Eds. Assaf Gamzou and Kenneth Koltun-Fromm. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
     
  • 鈥淚n Box: Text and the Speech Bubble in the Digital Age鈥 in , ed. Frederick Aldama. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
     
  • 鈥淐an鈥檛 Get There from Here: Deictic Will and the Mapped Life in Ma Jian鈥檚 Beijing Coma.鈥 (MCLC) 31.1 (2019): 47-78.
     
  • 鈥淢ixed with All the Hokum and Bally Hooey鈥: Chinese Food in America.鈥 Feature book review of From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express: A History of Chinese Food in the United States by Haiming Liu. China Review International, 23/1 (2016): 1-9.

 

Mulan Five Versions of a Classic Chinese Legend
Strange Eventful Histories Identity, Performance, and Xu Wei's Four Cries of a Gibbon
Regarding frames book cover image
book cover of Perfect Copies