Harlan Chambers completed his Ph.D. in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at Columbia University in 2022 and served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Illinois Wesleyan University before joining the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Göttingen in 2024. Since June 1, 2024, Mr. Chambers has been working as a research assistant in Professor Dr. Sachsenmaier’s Worldmaking project. As an interdisciplinary scholar of Chinese culture and history, as well as feminist and critical theory, his research interrogates the role of cultural practices in processes of social transformation, integrating archival research with analyses of cultural texts. He is currently developing his dissertation into a book-length project, Revolutionary Times: Narrating the Social in China’s Mass Campaigns, examining how writers and artists forged a new politics of time amidst the revolution’s history of mass campaigns.
As part of a research team exploring the history of conceptions of world order at the University of Göttingen, Harlan will interrogate internationalist cultural experiments in world-making.These include aesthetic and theoretical projects related to the League of Leftwing Writers, Sino-African relations, and cultural efforts to reimagine China’s place in the world amidst crises of the 1930. Harlan is also examining internationalist aesthetic debates of the early People’s Republic of China, particularly their relation to questions of socialist transition. This builds upon a series of workshops that he previously co-organized and hopes to continue developing at Göttingen, “Chinese Socialism in/as Theory: Political Economy in Revolutionary China.” In addition to peer-reviewed scholarship in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, he has translated or co-translated works by Wang Hui, Li Tuo, Zhang Jishun, and the contemporary artist Cao Fei, for positions: Asia Critique, Modern China, and The South Atlantic Quarterly.
PUBLICATIONS
Ph.D. Thesis
2022, “Revolutionary Times: Temporalities of Mobilization and Narrative in China’s Revolution” Columbia University
Peer-reviewed Articles
2019 “The ‘Liang Village Series’: Postsocialist Dynamics of Liang Hong’s Rural Investigation”. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. November, 2019: 249-292.
Public Articles
2021 “Revolution and its Narrative Battlefronts: a review of Brian Demare’s Land Wars: the Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution”. The PRC History Review Book Review Series.Vol. 6: 2, March, 2021: 5-9.
Translations
2023 Li Tuo. “The Two Movements in the 1980s: Forces that Shaped Contemporary China”. positions: Asia critique. Forthcoming.
2021 Li, Tuo. “The Pandemic and Contemporary Capitalism: An Interview with Tuo Li”. Boundary 2. Online. 13 January 2021.
2020 Zhang, Jishun. “Response”. The PRC History Review Book Review Series. No. 24, August 2020: 4-6.
2020 Wang, Hui. “Twentieth-Century China as an Object of Thought: An Introduction, Part 1 The Birth of the Century: The Chinese Revolution and the Logic of Politics”. Co-translation with Benjamin Kindler. Modern China. 46, no. 1. October, 2019: 1-46.
2020 Wang, Hui. “Twentieth-Century China as an Object of Thought: An Introduction, Part 2 The Birth of the Century: China and the Conditions of Spatial Revolution.” Co-translation with Benjamin Kindler. Modern China. 46, no. 2. March 2020: 115–60.
2017 Wang, Hui. “The Prophecy and Crisis of October”. Co-translation with Benjamin Kindler. The South Atlantic Quarterly. October 2017: 669-706.
2017 Wang, Hui. “After 89: Seeking a Glimmer of the Essential”. Co-translation with
Benjamin Kindler. The Guggenheim Foundation. Online. December 2017: 1-8.