Paula Varsano

Paula Varsano, Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, earned her B.A. in East Asian Studies at Yale University and her PhD in Chinese Literature at Princeton University. She specializes in classical poetry and poetics from the third through the eleventh centuries, with particular interest in literature and subjectivity, the evolution of spatial representation in poetry, the history and poetics of traditional literary criticism, and the theory and practice of translation. Besides articles published in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, and Reviews; Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, Asia Major, and Representations, she is also the author of Tracking the Banished Immortal: The Poetry of Li Bo and its Critical Reception (Hawaii, 2003), translator of François Jullien's Eloge de la fadeur (In Praise of Blandness, Zone Books, 2004), editor of The Rhetoric of Hiddenness in Traditional Chinese Culture (SUNY, 2016), and the forthcoming book, Knowing and Being Known:  The Lyric Subject in Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics. She is currently serving as chair of the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies.