DEPARTMENT OF ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES

Paola Zamperini has a Ph.D. in Chinese Literature and Women and Gender Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. She was recruited by Northwestern University in Summer 2013 as the founding chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at NU and Associate Professor of Chinese Literature, after a decade at Amherst College. Her work during the first three years at NU focused on building the new department by recruiting tenure and teaching line faculty; on developing and launching the new courses of studies in Asian humanities at both the undergraduate and the graduate level; and on mentoring undergraduate and graduate students on pre-modern Chinese literature and gender and sexuality studies. She also served on the Kaplan Institute Council, and as director of the Asian Studies Graduate Cluster, and helped usher in the new ASGC certificate program in this role. She has been part of the GSS advisory board since 2014, and, between Fall 2019 and September 2023, she served as director of Graduate Studies for the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, leading the GSS graduate colloquium, and advising students in the GSS cluster and certificate program. She became associate director of GSS in Fall 2023, and in this role, she currently serves on the GSS executive committee and its advisory board, coordinates GSS course planning, and participates in the curricular and intellectual life of this wonderful program. Professor Zamperini has also benefited from the lively space provided by the reading groups, symposia, and events organized by the Sexuality Project at Northwestern (SPAN), and was a SPAN Curricular Fellow (2020-2023), with the project entitled “Global Pornographies: A Transnational Approach,” to develop a course she will teach in AY 2024-2025. In Winter 2020, she taught for the first time a course on the Ming novel Xiyou ji, Journey to the West, as part of the Northwestern Prison Education Program, and hopes to be soon able to teach again as part of this wonderful program in the not so distant future, if her many administrative duties allow it.

In terms of service to the field of Chinese studies, Professor Zamperini served on the AAS Council for China and Inner Asia between 2007 and 2009 and became its chair for the last year of her three-year term on it. She was the pre-modern China book review editor for Journal of Asian Studies from 2016 to 2020. Since 2015 she has been involved with the ACLS/Luce Fellowship programs in a variety of roles, for selection committee member for its fellowship selections to senior mentors for ACLS/Luce fellows. In the AY 2020-2021, she took part of the Luce/ACLS China Studies Advisory Group, tasked with reimagining the fellowship program to meet the needs of China studies in the 21st century. We spent time deeply engaging changes in the field (in topics and approaches, but also in options for career development), recommendations for including mentoring in the fellowship program, as well as the relevance of China studies to society and policy. ACLS published the report informed by this collaboration in December 2021, and the re-designed programs have been implemented as of last year, promoting wider inclusivity, diversity, and possibilities to develop multidisciplinary and multimethod approaches to Sinophone/graph studies and Global China. She has also been increasingly active in MLA, as a panelist, presenter, and as an officer on committees, to further develop the footprint of Chinese studies and gender and sexuality studies in the Sinosphere in that context, that too often still does not showcase as much non-Western literatures and cultures. Her vision for Sinophone studies lies in global, multilingual, interdisciplinary framework, welcoming to all, and imprinted on promoting, developing, and circulating decolonial, accessible, and imaginative research trajectories.

From this perspective, gender and sexuality studies, along with feminist theory and studies, are an integral part not only of Zamperini’s training and research, but also of her pedagogy, and she has consistently divided her teaching at Northwestern between Asian Languages and Cultures, where she regularly teaches courses about pre-modern Chinese literature, dream cultures, fashion theory and histories, Buddhist literary cultures in East Asia past and present, contemporary Chinese fiction, cinema, and popular culture, and Gender and Sexuality Studies, where she teaches core courses such as “Sexual Subjects: Introduction to Sexuality Studies,” and “Traditions of Feminist Thought;” graduate seminars like “Deleuze, Desire, Guattari, and Sexuality,” and also “Chinese Feminisms,” and “Sinophone Feminisms.” Because of the interdisciplinarity of her training and research, most of her courses are co-listed with GSS. As a first-generation immigrant and college student involved in non-Western cultures, her main pedagogical and research mission is focused on decolonizing the fields of studies she inhabits. She thus aims to create learning environments imprinted by the methodologies and approaches of feminist and queer theory, whilst preserving and deepening engagement with Chinese and East Asian cultural traditions, past and present. She is also quite attuned to her students’ needs to understand the academic and non-academic worlds they navigate through feminist epistemologies, as her recent interview with EFE journalist Alicia Sánchez Gómez about Taylor Swift’s purported feminism well illustrates.

Her connection to Europe as a native Italian, and as a first generation college student and immigrant to the USA, has brought her to develop research and intellectual connections with major sinological centers, and over the past two decades, she has collaborated as a researcher, teacher, and undergraduate and graduate student mentor with the Center for Asian and Transcultural Studies, known as CATS, the premiere Asian studies center in Europe, at Heidelberg University. The recipient of a Tandem fellowship in 2018, which allowed Professor Zamperini to collaborate with China scholars at Heidelberg University, give lectures, and teach courses and organize conferences on comparative pornographies in Germany, she received in December 2023 a two-year Cluster of Excellence Initiative grant  for international scholars (Internationalen Gastprofessurenprogramm) from the German government to develop pedagogical and research connections with Professor Barbara Mittler at Heidelberg University. Over the course of summer 2024, Professor Zamperini will teach at Heidelberg the feminist theory course “Sinophone feminisms,” part of which will become integrated with the course of the same name she will offer in Fall 2024 at NU, and that will include virtual guest speakers from all over the world who will join the NU and Heidelberg students. In Summer 2025 she will return to Heidelberg to teach “Beyond Shangrila. Narratives of Tibet,” a course she began teaching in Amherst College in the 2010s and that speaks to her decade-long deep engagement with Sinotibetan studies. The course will pay particular attention to configurations of gender, sexuality, masculinity, femininity, and animal studies, it will also deliberate the emergence of Sino-Tibetan and Chinese fiction and cinema as the primary spaces in which Tibetan, Chinese, and Sino-Tibetan as well as foreign voices present contested versions of Tibetan identities. It is her hope to offer the same course at NU in Fall 2025.

Given that Zamperini has spent most of her life living, thinking, and speaking at the crossroads of at least three (and often many more) different languages, she has a life-long commitment to translation studies, theories, and practices. She has so date translated literary and academic works from Chinese into Italian, English, and vice versa, though unfortunately none of her translation work has ever been considered as an academic endeavor, though recently this trend has begun to be reversed. Since 2016, Zamperini has been an American jury member for the fiction-Book Award The Bridge, organized by Casa delle Letterature of the Rome Municipality, the American Initiative for Italian Culture (AIFIC), the Embassy of the United States in Rome, and the National Italian American Foundation (NIAF). Between 2021 and 2023 she also served as member first and then as chair of Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature Selection Committee for the MLA.

To date, Zamperini has written and published extensively books and articles about representations of prostitution, female suicide, fashion theory and history, pornography, and spiritual resonance, in Chinese literature and culture and beyond. Among her (too many?) works in progress, she is currently working on a translation of Michela Murgia’s Stai Zitta e altre nove frasi che non vogliamo sentire piu’ into English, a monograph on sartorial practices in 21^stcentury Sinosphere, and a book on transnational feminist pedagogies. Zamperini recently submitted three different publication proposals (one for Sinopornologies. Writing Sex in Early Modern Chinese Fiction, one for Spellbound. Gambling in Chinese Literature, and one for For the Love of a Peacock. Fashion in Chinese Literature respectively) to three different publishing houses, so, fingers crossed!

Keywords: Literatures and cultures in Chinese, gender and sexuality studies, porn studies, feminist theory, queer studies, fashion theory, fashion studies, East Asian studies, Sinotibetan studies, translation studies.

Selected Bibliography and recent media appearances

Taylor Swift’s Whitestream feminism, an interview with EFENews

Paola Zamperini speaks on the Chinese fashion industry in the 21st century on CGTN AMERICA

A Family Romance: Specters of Incest in Eileen Chang's “Xinjing.” Prism (2020) 17 (1): 1–34.

“Ties that Cut. Alter/native Portrayals of Chinese Women” (in Chinese), Global History Review,special issue on “Women and gender from the global perspective,” China Social Sciences Press, 2019.

Fashion, China, and Trends: A Critical Perspective, with Tina Mai Chen, China Policy Institute, Nottingham University, July 17, 2015. 

“Teaching with Tankas,” co-authored with Maria Heim, in the catalogue Picturing Enlightenment: Tibetan Tangkas in the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, 2013.

Lost Bodies: Prostitution and Masculinity in Chinese Fiction, E. J. Brill, Leiden, 2010.

A Dream of Butterflies? Shoes in Chinese Culture, in A Cultural History of Shoes, Berg, 2006.

“On Their Dress They Wore A Body. Fashion and Identity in late Qing Shanghai,” in the special issue “Fabrications”, edited by Tina Mai Chen and Paola Zamperini, positions, Duke University Press, 11.2, 2003.

Il Libro dei Tre caratteri, Sellerio, Palermo, 1992.

Gli strani casi del Giudice Li, Sellerio, Palermo, 1991.