Wandi Wang

Wandi Wang is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate currently working on premodern Chinese poetics, aesthetics, and gastronomy. She received her master’s degree from Stanford University and studied for one year as a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington before joining the EAL&C Department at UC Santa Barbara. Now she is working with Thomas Mazanec, Xiaorong Li, Peter Sturman, and Michael Fuller.

Her dissertation “Taste and Gastropoetics in Traditional China, 9th-17th cent CE,” explores how literati taste and aesthetics construct gastronomy as a literati art, and how gastronomic writings relate to politics, society, ethics, and literature. It speaks to the fields of literary history, art history, sensory culture, material culture, and food studies, to tell a new story about the emergence of classical literati ideals from the Song to the Ming dynasty. Her writings will be featured in the forthcoming Journal of Song-Yuan Studies.