Biography

Guanrui Gong is a Ph.D. student in middle-period Chinese literature and cultural history. Her current research examines how writers at the imperial library in Song China employed various genres to perform, contest, and even resist their professional identities and institutional relationships. Drawing on a range of materials including bureaucratic writings, miscellaneous notes, and occasional poetry, she investigates how an institution perpetuates itself through the accumulated writing practices of its members. Beyond her dissertation, she has also worked on topics including the cultural meanings of tea, grains, and flowers in the Song, women and cleanliness in the Ming novel Plum in the Golden Vase, and cleaning labor in “rules of purity” texts in Chan Buddhism with intersections with Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals. In the future, she looks to write a literary history from the point of view of the sea for the land-bound writers and poets (like the rest of us).

Education

Prior to UCLA, she received an M.A. in Chinese from the University of Colorado, Boulder and a B.A. in Philosophy from Boston College.