Grace Fong

Grace Fong (B.A., M.A. University of Toronto; Ph.D. University of British Columbia) is Professor of Premodern Chinese Literature in the Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University. She has published widely on classical Chinese poetry and women’s writings in the Ming and Qing dynasties.

Her recent publications include the monograph Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008) and the co-edited volumes Different Worlds of Discourse: Transformations of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and Early Republican China (Leiden: Brill, 2008) and The Inner Quarters and Beyond: Women Writers from Ming through Qing (Leiden: Brill 2010). She is also the editor of the Brill series Women and Gender in China Studies and the project editor of Ming Qing Women’s Writings, a digital archive and database of more than 100 collections of women’s writings in the holdings of the Harvard-Yenching Library and Peking University Library.

Her ongoing research examines the dialectic construction of life histories in women’s literary collections through text and paratext, which reveal hidden lives, new discourses, and gendered practices that complicate and enrich current knowledge of biographical and autobiographical practices in Chinese culture. In the current project, she explores both conventional and emergent genres in new print media as significant sites for examining the construction of women as new writers and readers in late Qing and early Republican China.