Hangping Xu

Hangping Xu is a doctoral candidate at Stanford University, with two Master's degrees in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies respectively. He is also pursuing a Ph.D minor in Gender and Sexuality Studies; additionally, he participates in Stanford's Digital Humanties lab, exploring the utilizations, in research and pedagogy, of visualization and mapping technologies. Transnational and interdisciplinary in its approach, his research focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese literature, film, and culture. His publications have appeared or are forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals such as Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), Critical Multilingualism Studies, and Pacific Affairs, as well as from Cambridge University Press (book chapter). He is currently completing his dissertation titled "Vulnerable Bodies as Agents: Disability Aesthetics and Politics in Modern Chinese Culture," which investigates the shifting representations and performances of the disabled body in Chinese fiction, film, and popular culture over the long twentieth century. Drawing upon, among others, political and moral philosophy, critical theory, cultural anthropology, performance theory, literary and cultural studies, the dissertation project tracks the hegemonic establishment, following the birth of the modern nation-state, of what can be called the ideology of ability (or ableism); it seeks to reconstruct disability in political, rather than pathological, terms, critically examining the manners in which the disabled body figures at the intersection of aesthetics, ethics, and politics. Not only does the dissertation aim to launch the minority identity of disability as a political concept for reconsidering Chinese modernity but also ultimately for revisiting theoretical paradigms, especially with regard to critical questions such as agency, embodiment, gender, sexuality, aesthetics, citizenship, and social justice. His papers have been presented at major conferences such as the American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting, the International Society for the History of Rhetoric biennial conference, and the Modern Language Association annual convention (scheduled). He has taught language, literature, film, writing and rhetoric classes at the college level for more than six years. In 2015, he won the Centennial Teaching Award from Stanford University. The other distinctions and awards that he has received include the Silas Palmer Research Fellowship from the Hoover Institute, the Best Presentation Award from the Chinese Language Teachers Association of California (CLTAC) annual conference, and the Mori-ASPAC Best Paper Prize from Asian Studies on the Pacific Coast Annual Conference.