DEPARTMENT OF ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES

Sihan Wang specializes in modern and Sinophone Chinese literature, aesthetics, and religion. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literary Studies and Asian Languages and Cultures from Northwestern University in 2025. Her research positions Chan Buddhism as a formal-temporal logic that reorganizes how time, subjectivity, and form are experienced in Chinese-language literary and artistic production, distinct from its usual treatment as spiritual residue or cultural influence. Her current book project, East of Now: Chan Aesthetics and Chinese Modernity, traces this method across poetry, fiction, cultural theory, and film from the late Qing to the present, showing how writers and artists from Wang Guowei to Tsai Ming-liang mobilized a "self-emerging present" as an alternative to the belatedness and derivativeness that structure dominant accounts of postcolonial and non-Western modernity. The project reframes comparative modernism by demonstrating how a religious-aesthetic tradition, irreducible to Zen's global circulation or to narratives of influence and response, constitutes a critical method with its own capacity to both create and theorize the modern.

Her teaching spans literature, film, and popular culture across Chinese, Sinophone, and East Asian contexts, with additional courses in animal studies and world literature.

She also engages museum and art spaces in her public humanities work, including collaborations with Evanston Art Center, Heritage Museum of Asian Art, and Qualia Contemporary Art to promote Asian diasporic artists. Her creative and public-facing writing can be found in Sixty Inches from Center, the Victoria Yau archive, and Dumplings.