About:

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 research is funded by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the T’ang Studies Society, and several other funding sources.

Selected publications:

Peer-reviewed Journal Article

“A Lyrical Cookbook: Gastropoetics in Pure Offerings in the Mountains,” Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 53 (2024): 93–126. (DOI: 10.1353/sys.2024.a946875)

Single-Authored Books

沈津乐道——八十忆往录 (Shum Chun’s Delightful Discourse: Eight Decades of Cherished Memories), Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, in press.

书剑万里缘——吴文津雷颂平合传 (A Lifelong Romance Rooted in Books and the Sword: A Joint Biography of Eugene Wu and Nadine Louie), Beijing: Guojia tushuguan chubanshe, 2021. [simplified character version]; Taipei: Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 2021. [traditional character version]