Maria Franca SibauAssociate Professor, Chinese

My research and teaching interests are in late imperial Chinese literature and culture, drama, Confucian traditions, and commentaries. My first book, Reading for the Moral: Exemplarity and the Confucian Moral Imagination in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Short Fiction (SUNY Press, 2018), discusses fictional representations of moral exemplars in late Ming vernacular stories. My current projects continue to pursue my fascination with how ethical norms and moral dilemmas are explored in vernacular texts, and with the cultural mechanism and rhetorical strategies underlying the continuous updating, parodying, and debunking of exalted exemplars.

I received my B.A. degree from Venice University, M.A. degree in East Asian Studies from UCLA, and Ph.D. in traditional Chinese literature from Harvard University. My articles have appeared in CHINOPERL, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and CLEAR. At Emory, I teach courses on traditional Chinese literature, fiction, and drama, Confucian classics, women writers in premodern China, and comparative novella traditions (Italy and China).