Chunjie Zhang

Candidate statement

Chunjie Zhang (Ph.D., Duke, 2010) is Associate Professor of German at the University of California, Davis. She works on the long eighteenth century, global modernisms, Asian-German studies, contemporary refugee literature, and postcolonialism. Her scholarship and teaching endeavor to explore transcultural perspectives in German literature and culture. She is on the program committee for the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies 2021. Her first book Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism (Northwestern UP 2017) situates German literature and philosophy in the polycentric global eighteenth century and delineates the contour of a transcultural discourse. Moving beyond the question of empire or enlightenment, her book reads travel writing, literature, and philosophy to shift ground from predominantly critiquing Eurocentrism toward diligently detecting global connections and enhancing the visibility of non-European contributions in global modernity. Actively engaging in Asian German studies, Chunjie edited the scholarly forum on “Asian German Studies” with German Quarterly (93.1, Winter 2020). The contributors discuss the state of this emerging interdisciplinary field and reviews themes such as Chinese-German, Japanese-German, Indian-German, Vietnamese-German connections related to exile studies, Turkish-German studies, global German studies, and transpacific German studies. Chunjie also initiated and co-edits a new book series “Asia, Europe, and Global Connections” (Routledge). Her edited book Composing Modernist Connections in China and Europe (Routledge, 2019) stresses modernist connections beyond the bifurcation between East and West. She also co-edited the issue “Goethe, Worlds, and Literatures” (Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 2018) that shows the different constructions of Goethe as a classical writer for the concept of world literature in various historical and cultural contexts. Among her articles, she recently wrote about the refugee crisis as well as social distancing and the aesthetics of touch. Her recent research has been supported by the Humboldt Foundation, the DAAD, and the University of California.