Chi-ming Yang

Chi-ming Yang received her Ph.D. in English from Cornell University and her B.A. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University. She has taught at Fordham University and held a Mellon Post-doctoral Fellowship at Barnard College, Columbia University. She specializes in 18th-century British literature and culture, with interests in travel writing, empire, colonialism, and East-West relations. Her book, Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-century England, 1660-1760 (forthcoming, Johns Hopkins University Press), is a study of the European fascination with Asia in the early modern period. It focuses on how China becomes an intensely debated example of virtue amidst England’s new consumer culture. Publications related to this theme of early modern orientalism have appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics. Her new work concerns transatlantic slavery, 17th and 18th century economic theories, and the cultural impact of global flows of silver between Latin America and East Asia.