Biography

Yinghui Wu is Associate Professor of Chinese literature at UCLA. She is a scholar of early modern Chinese literature (the Ming and Qing periods) with research interests in drama, fiction, popular culture, performance, and media history. She received her PhD in Chinese and Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis. Before joining UCLA, she has taught at Leiden University in the Netherlands. She offers courses on Chinese narrative traditions, drama and theater, masterworks of the Ming novel such as Jing Ping Mei, and seminars on literary history and interdisciplinary methodologies.

Her first monograph, Playing with Plays: Drama and Early Modern Chinese Media Ecologies (Brill, 2025), advances a new model for understanding early modern Chinese drama as expanding processes of cultural innovation that hinge on the multiplying and refashioning of media. Instead of studying drama as merely a product of the page or the stage, the book underscores a series of cultural experimentations with plays (which she terms “playing with plays”) as vital to the experience of drama in seventeenth-century China. An in-depth study of these cultural experimentations, which cross the oral, written, manuscript, print, visual, and singing media, helps us investigate the dynamic interactions of drama and the media ecologies of the late Ming and early Qing era, and how they worked to shape people’s perception and experience and enabled new subject positions to emerge. The book features close examination of the cultural phenomena of “playing with plays,” and rigorous conceptual engagement with the latest developments in media studies. The purpose is to develop an effective model to illuminate early modern Chinese ideas and practices of mediation (to articulate how “media” works) while provoking a historically informed reflection on the contemporary study of media.

Her articles on the interplay between theater culture and the examination essay, book illustrations as experiment with hypermedia, etc., have appeared in T’oung Pao and East Asian Publishing and Society. She is also the co-editor of Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600-1850: Between East and West (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), a volume of essays that explore the distinct representations of emotions and passions in conventionally understudied genres such as journals, memoirs, conduct manuals, and correspondences in early modern Asia and Europe.