About this Event
Peng Xu’s (University of Michigan Press, 2025) reinterprets late Ming drama by foregrounding courtesan performance culture as a generative force in theatrical production. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including scripts, city guides, biographies, diaries, letters, and visual materials—it argues that courtesans were not merely subjects of representation but active agents who reshaped theatrical form, performance conditions, and literary style. In doing so, it challenges male-centered historiography and offers a new framework for understanding gender, media, and creativity in early modern Chinese theater.
About the author: Peng Xu received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. Currently Associate Professor at ShanghaiTech University, she has held academic appointments at institutions across the U.S. and Asia. She actively promotes cross-disciplinary and transnational dialogues in Chinese literary and performance studies, with a particular emphasis on the agency of actresses and women poets. She has published in leading journals, including Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Late Imperial China, T’oung Pao, CLEAR: Chinese Literature, Essays, and Reviews, and Ars Orientalis.
An award-winning scholar-performer specializing in Kunqu and Peking Opera, Dr. Xu integrates scholarship and stage practice. Her English Kunqu production, Madame Cassia, adapted from a nineteenth-century play, premiered in the Lab Theatre of the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in 2022.
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This event is sponsored by GW's Chinese Arts & Humanities Initiative and the Department of World Religions, and is part of the Kim-Renaud East Asian Humanities Lecture Series sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures.
Event venue & nearby stays
George Washington University Science and Engineering Hall, 800 22nd Street Northwest, Washington, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.