Jinyi Chu

Jinyi Chu's picture
Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Director of Undergraduate Studies
Address: 
HQ 542
203-432-1302
Office Hours: 
Thursdays, 2:00-4:00 p.m. or by appointment.

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CV: Jinyi Chu

EDUCATION:

Ph.D. Slavic Languages and Literatures, Stanford University, 2019
M.A. Russian Literature, Shanghai International Studies University, 2012
B.A. Russian and English, Shanghai International Studies University, 2010
Visiting Researcher, Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinskii Dom), Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, 2015-2016

INTERESTS:

I am a scholar of Russian and Chinese literature and culture of the 19th and 20thcentury. Focusing on the interplay between geopolitics and transnational aesthetics, my research and teaching interests span Russian modernist poetry and prose, socialist culture, Russo-Chinese relations, science fiction, memory and memoirs, and translation studies.

My first book The Other is The Universal: Fin-de-siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics (Oxford UP, forthcoming 2024) shows that modernism in Russia emerged not merely under Western influence, but also from a sustained dialogue with Chinese culture. Drawing upon the Sino-Russian case, this book argues that modernist engagement with foreign culture is a search for a higher universal in the age of heightened global interconnectedness.

My second and ongoing book project Aesthetics of Reform: China and the Soviet Union in the 1980s offers a transnational account of how the idea of “reform” was aestheticized in Soviet and Chinese literature, film, and Marxist theory. It argues that the Soviet and Chinese reforms were more than mere westernization and marketization; they were urgent reimagination of the common socialist future beyond nation-state politics.

In addition to these two major projects, I also have authored peer-reviewed articles and public essays in both English and Chinese on the writing of Vladimir Lenin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Nabokov, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, as well as science fiction in Russia and China and etc.

I am a translator of Russian, Chinese, and English. I have translated Joseph Frank’s biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky (English to Chinese) and Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s writing on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Russian to English), among many other literary and scholarly works.

My interview on YaleNews: https://news.yale.edu/2022/04/11/office-hours-jinyi-chu

Current Book Projects

The Other is the Universal: Fin-de-siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics (Forthcoming, Oxford University Press)

Aesthetics of Reform: China and the Soviet Union in 1980s (Book Manuscript)

Special Issues edited:

“Traveling Theory between Russia and China,” International Comparative Literature, no.1 & no.2, 2022

“Chinese Science Fiction and the World,” Science Fiction Research Association Review, vol.51, no.2, 2021

Peer-Reviewed Articles in English: 

“Civilizational Myth and Class Politics: Lenin on China and Racial Revolution,” Comparative Literature 75, no.2 (2023): 140-152

“(Trans-) National Contexts: The Russian Poetics of the Chinese Avant-garde,” International Comparative Literature 5, no.1 (2022): 68-83

“Chinese Science Fiction in Contemporary Russia,” Science Fiction Research Association Review 51, no.2 (2021): 72-75

“The Aphoristic Way: Lev Tolstoy’s Translations of the Dao De Jing,” Comparative Literature Studies 58, no.1 (2021): 146-175

“The Afterlife of Post-Apocalypse: Dmitry Glukhovsky in China,” Anindita Banerjee and Sonja Fritzsche. ed. Science Fiction Circuits of the South and East. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2018, 215-238

Peer-Reviewed Articles in Chinese

“Orientalism and Avant-garde: China in Fin-de-siècle Russian Visual Arts,” Russian Literature and Art [Eluosi Wenyi], no. 4 (2023): 128-138

“Conceptualism and Its Discontent: Groys and Prigov on Conceptual Art,” The Study of Art [Yishuxue yanjiu], no. 1 (2021): 112-118

“The Fantastic in Russian Literary Criticism” Russian Literature and Art [Eluosi Wenyi], no. 4 (2020): 93-101

“Mimetic Desire in Nabokov’s Despair,” Russian Literature and Art [Eluosi Wenyi], no. 2 (2019): 16-22

“The 1915 Version of Boris Pasternak’s ‘Soul’,” Russian Literature and Art [Eluosi Wenyi], no. 4 (2018): 82-90

“Baudelaire in the Russian Symbolist Vision,” Russian Literature and Art [Eluosi Wenyi], no. 2 (2012): 53-64

“Russian Readings of Baudelaire in the Age of Realism,” Comparative Literature in China [Zhongguo bijiao wenxue] 83, no. 2 (2011): 131-144

Public Academic Essays in Chinese

“To the Winter Palace: From the Pragmatics of Empire to the Public Space for the Mass,” Shanghai Review of Books [Shanghai shuping], May 24, 2023

“Modernism and Aphasia,” Dushu, no.4 (2023): 51-58.

“The Dreamer or the Flaneur: The Petersburg Modernity (Dostoevsky at 200),” Shanghai Review of Books, [Shanghai shuping], Nov. 11, 2021

“The Vanishing of the Exotic,” Tianya, no.4 (2021): 64-68

“A Russian Genealogy of Scientific Fantasy,” Shanghai Review of Books [Shanghai Shuping], Aug. 17, 2017

Academic Book Reviews in English

“Japan’s Russia: Challenging East-West Paradigm, edited by Olga Solovieva and Sho Konishi. New York: Cambria, 2021.” Russian Review 83, no.3 (2022): 572-573

“A Brown Man in Russia: Lessons Learned on the Trans-Siberian, by Vijay Menon. London: Glagoslav Publications, 2018.” Slavic and East European Journal 62, no.4 (2018): 739-740

Translations: 

Dmitry Merezhskovsky. “On Dostoevsky,” (from Russian to English, forthcoming Amherst College Press)

Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time. Co-trans. Jinyi Chu, Sha Li, Jiayu Wang. Beijing: The Chinese Huaqiao Publishing House, 2019. (From English to Chinese)

Mancosu, Paolo. Smugglers, Rebels, Pirates: Itineraries in the Publishing History of Doctor Zhivago. Trans. Jinyi Chu. Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2018 (from English to Chinese)

Sochalin, Oleg. “Platok” [“The Scarf”], in Foreign Literature and Art [Wai Guo Wen Yi], no.5 (2015): 115-120. (From Russian to Chinese)

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: 

Modernism and Revolution; Russian and Chinese Science Fiction; Science and Literature in Russia; Socialist ’80s; Sino-Russian Relations

GRADUATE COURSES: 

Memory and Memoir in Russian Culture; 18th-century Russian Literature; Russian Romantic Poetry; Russian Symbolist Poetry; Fin-de-siècle Russia