Biography

Sixiang Wang is an Associate Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. He is a historian of Chosŏn Korea and early modern East Asia. His research interests include comparative perspectives on early modern empires, the history of science and knowledge, and issues of language and writing in Korea’s cultural and political history. He teaches courses in Korea’s pre-nineteenth-century history as well as the history of cultural and intellectual interactions in early modern East Asia.

Boundless Winds of Empire: Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Chosŏn Diplomacy with Ming China

His 2023 book, Boundless Winds of Empire: Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Chosŏn Diplomacy with Ming China (Winner of the 2025 Palais Prize and the 2024 Hong Yung Lee Prize in Korean Studies) reconstructs the cultural strategies of Korean diplomacy with Ming empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It underscores how Korean ritual and literary practices inserted Chosŏn into the Ming empire’s legitimating strategies and established Korea as a stakeholder in a shared imperial tradition.

Sixiang Wang received his PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University. Before joining the UCLA faculty, he was a Mellon Scholar of the Humanities at Stanford University and a Moon Family Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also helping curate the UCLA Korean History and Culture Digital Museum with his students (https://koreanhistory.humspace.ucla.edu/)