Ni Zhange
Received her Ph.D. in Religion and Literature from the University of Chicago Divinity School (2009), and worked as a research associate and visiting assistant professor at the “Women’s Studies in Religion” Program at Harvard Divinity School (2010-2011).
Received her Ph.D. in Religion and Literature from the University of Chicago Divinity School (2009), and worked as a research associate and visiting assistant professor at the “Women’s Studies in Religion” Program at Harvard Divinity School (2010-2011). She was a research fellow at the Nantes Institute for Advanced Study in France from 2021 to 2022. She is currently an associate professor at the Department of Religion and Culture, Virginia Tech. Her first book The Pagan Writes Back: When World Religion Meets World Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2015) proposes “pagan criticism,” a new reading strategy that attends to the historical complexities and contingencies in literary texts and challenges both Christian and secularist assumptions regarding aesthetics and hermeneutics. She has written articles on secularism and religion-making in twentieth-century China on the one hand, religion and contemporary popular literature in the Euro-American West on the other. Her second book is tentatively entitled The Cult of Fiction in the Age of the Internet: Chinese Religions, Digital Capitalism, and the Fantasy Boom in Contemporary China. It studies how internet-based fantasy novels have fused ancient magic with contemporary technoscience to wrestle with the radical social, economic and political transformations caused by the rise of digital capitalism. In addition, Ni is a writer of creative works in China, having published two novels, three essay collections, and four books of poetry: Homeland of Emptiness (Nanjing University Press, 2010), A Sea of Bare Blades (Henan University Press, 2015), Whose Lie Is the Snow (Shanghai Sanlianshudian, 2018), and The Sabbatical Animal (Shanghai Sanlianshudian, 2022).
