Department Faculty - Theatre

Haiping Yan

The Department welcomes back Haiping, who completed her MA and PhD degrees at Cornell after obtaining her BA from Fudan University in China. After leaving Cornell, Haiping has taught at the University of Colorado, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and, most recently, as Professor of Critical Studies and Director of the US-China Arts and Media Programs at The School of Theatre, Film and Television at UCLA.

Professor and Director of the Graduate Field in Theatre Studies, and a graduate faculty in the fields of East Asian Literature and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, Haiping Yan’s specialties include comparative drama, theatre and multi-media performance, modernist aesthetics and critical theories, transnational studies of theatre and performance, and modern Chinese literary, cultural and social history. Her book publications include Theatre and Society: an Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama; Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1905-1948; Other Transnationals: Asian Diaspora in Performance; and Globalization and the Development of Humanistic Studies. Recently completed her new book manuscript titled Imagining China: Tropes of Home in Intermedial Performance, she is working on another project on transnational imagination in modern artistic and cultural history, and a memoir titled The Class of 77: the Making of Global China. Her accolades include China’s 1980-1981 First Prize for Excellence in Drama (the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize in the U.S.) for her ten-act historical play titled Li Shimin, Prince of Qin; an entry in Outstanding Scholars of the Twentieth Century, by the International Biographical Centre, Cambridge, UK, May 2000; CNN’s 1999 selection as one of “six most influential Chinese cultural figures” for her scholarly and creative works in English and Chinese, and a chapter in Shanghai Literary and Artistic History since the 1840s compiled by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, forthcoming in October 2009.

Haiping Yan served on the Executive Committee of the American Society for Theatre Research and worked as the President Elect of Women and Theatre Association. She has been serving as a judge on the Best Book Annual Award Committee since 2006 and a member of the Committee for Research and Publications since 2007 for the American Association for Theatre in Higher Education.

Yan is an invited mini-seminar leader of 2006 Cornell School of Criticism and Theory and the 2007-2008 Norman Freehling Professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She holds a Zijiang Professorship in Humanistic Studies at East China Normal University (ECNU) in Shanghai since 2003, conducting advanced summer seminars and international scholarly forums. Working in the capacity of the Director of Cornell-China Institute, and initiative funded by the Provost Office, since fall 2008, Yan has founded the Cornell-ECNU Center for Comparative Humanities in June 2009, with its Shanghai office established on the fifth floor in the new building for the humanities on ECNU’s campus, equipped by a multi-media archiving-library. Its inaugural symposium on “Globalization and Comparative Humanities,” which took place July 31-August 2, 2009, was a bilateral and cross-cultural event featured by ten senior faculty members from Cornell and ECNU, participated by fifty scholars from leading universities across China.

Haiping Yan always welcomes and enjoys conversations with colleagues and students on any aspects of the arts and humanistic innovations in cross-cultural, globalizing contexts.

For more information on Professor Yan's new book, Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1905-1948, visit www.routledge.com/asianstudies