Faculty Directors
Ping Wang, assistant professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University,
specializes in premodern Chinese literature. She received a B.A. in English literature from Anhui University, China, an M.A. in Chinese literature from the University of Colorado, and a Ph.D. in Chinese literature from the University of Washington. Her research focuses on early medieval Chinese poetry. Wang has written on the poetic image of the maple leaf, literary communities in China in the fifth and sixth centuries, the literary imagination of the north after its fall in 317, and poetry as cultural capital in early medieval China. She is currently preparing a book based on her dissertation titled “Culture and Literature in an Early Medieval Chinese Court: The Writings and Literary Thought of Xiao Tong (501–531).”
Chunling Li is a professor in the Department of Sociology and a research fellow at 
the Institute of Sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing. Li earned a B.A. and an M.A. in history from Peking University and a Ph.D. in sociology from CASS. She has published widely on social stratification and mobility, the sociology of education, and gender studies, including “Formation of the Middle Class in Comparative Perspective: Process, Influence, and Socioeconomic Consequence” and “Theories of Social Stratification." Her most recent research projects examine “The Expansion of Higher Education and the Inequality of Educational Opportunity” and “Attitudes and Situation: The 1980’s Generation in Social Transformation.”
