Office: HMNSS 2413
Phone: (951) 827-1219

yenna.wu@ucr.edu

YENNA WU
Director of Asian Languages and Civilizations
Distinguished Professor, Chinese/Civilizations/Comparative Literature
Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, 1986

Professor Yenna Wu’s area of specialization is Chinese literature, culture, and language. She is also involved in gender, narrative, and Sino-Western comparative studies, as well as Chinese language pedagogy and translation. Her numerous publications include The Chinese Virago: A Literary Theme (Harvard, 1995) and The Great Wall of Confinement: The Chinese Prison Camp Through Contemporary Fiction and Reportage (co-authored with Philip F. Williams, California, 2004).

Professor Wu is currently translating The Great Wall of Confinement into Chinese, and exploring psychological trauma in prison camp fiction and memoirs by co-editing a related collection of essays called Discipline and Publish: Prisoners in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Social Science Research. She continues her research on literary portrayals of cannibalism, engaging postcolonial discourse on this topic. Her research on the representation of gender dynamics has broadened to include analyses of the differences between Western feminism and Chinese Women’s Studies in the context of transnational feminism and globalization.

Professor Wu’s 1999 co-authored Chinese language textbook Chinese the Easy Way is now available in streaming-audio hosted by the UCR website. She is currently researching heritage language pedagogy and co-authoring a textbook for Mandarin heritage speakers, Heritage Chinese: First-year Mandarin.

Professor Wu's Curriculum Vitae