Zhenzhen Lu

Zhenzhen Lu is a scholar of late imperial Chinese literature and culture. She is interested broadly in the histories of literary production and publishing during the 17th-19th centuries in East Asia, especially the enduring roles of manuscript cultures in an age perceived to be dominated by print. She is currently completing her book on The Vernacular World of Pu Songling, which examines language and literature from the perspective of locality through the manuscripts of village scholars from Qing Shandong. As a recipient of the Gerald D. Feldman travel grant from the Max Weber Stiftung, Zhenzhen will be conducting research on the history of the Ryōsai Bunko at Keio University, the archive that has preserved much of these materials, whose origin with a Japanese doctor and collector in 1930s Shandong lies among a larger story of transnational collecting of Chinese literature in the first decades of the 20^th century.

Zhenzhen received her Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania and was formerly a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at the University of Hamburg, where she worked on a project on the scribal production of entertainment literature in 19^th century Beijing. She is currently an assistant professor in the Asian Studies Program at Bates College (USA).