Professor Li earned her BA from the University of Hong Kong and a PhD from Princeton University, where she taught before coming to Harvard University. She was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and received a senior scholar research grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholar Exchange. Her first book, Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature (Princeton University Press: 1993), traces the discourse on desire and its myriad transformations in the Chinese literary tradition. She is also the author of The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography (Harvard University Asia Center: forthcoming), which investigates the ordering impulse of Chinese culture in understanding the past, especially in connection with conceptions of rhetoric, exegesis, and interpretation of early China.
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