Admission

PhD in Chinese Language and Literature

General Introduction

The Doctoral Program in Chinese Language and Literature is designed to educate and equip competent students with solid theoretical foundations, a systemmatic knowledge base, and an international academic vision, in order to conduct innovative scholarly research in the field of Chinese language, literature, and culture. Graduates may become teachers and researchers in higher educational institutions, or take on demanding job positions in relevant industries.

Program Objectives

• to inspire creativity and develop analytical techniques for literary research;

• to equip students with a cross-disciplinary awareness and basic scholarly skillsets such as academic writing in both Chinese and English, communication at conferences, cooperative capacity, etc..  

• to provide the necessary academic support for students to develop innovative research; the PhD dissertation should be eligible for publication after revision.

Courses

PhD students are required to take several mandatory seminars designed to cultivate basic academic skills and familiarize students with leading faculty members in the department. These courses include “Frontiers of Chinese Language and Literature” and “Academic Writing.” Those entering the PhD program without an MA degree are also required to take seminars aimed at building a comprehensive and solid foundation for future research, including “Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture and Society,” “Theory and Criticism in Aesthetics,” “Theory and Methods in Linguistics,” and “Perspectives and Research Methods in the Study of Classical Chinese Literature.” Other than these required courses, students may design their own individual curricula based on their scholarly interest under the guidence of their advisors. More than twenty graduate elective courses are offered by the department, covering all major fields of research in the discipline.

Research Directions

PhD students may choose one of the following areas as their main field of study:

Literary Theory:

the history of Chinese and Western literary and artistic thought, literary aesthetics and criticism, digital art and visual culture, 20th-century Chinese literary and aesthetic theory, modern and postmodern Western literary thought, and digital humanities.

Modern Chinese Literature: 

modern Chinese literary history, revolutionary and left-wing literature, as well as cultural studies.

Classical Chinese Literature and Philology: 

Pre-Qin and Han literature, East Asian comparative literature, digital humanities, and Chinese classical legal literature.

Linguistics and Applied Linguistics: 

Classical philology, historical linguistics, history of the Chinese language, studies on dialects and regional culture, and lexicography.

Comparative Literature and World Literature:

English literature, comparative poetics, cross-disciplinary literary studies. Featured research directions include Western classical poetics, European Renaissance literature, science fiction and tech-humanities.

In addition, PhD students are encouraged to actively participate and even take on leading roles in reading groups, attend conferences and lectures offered by the seven academic clusters set up to do cross-disciplinary work.