Harlan Chambers is a Ph.D. candidate in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture in the Department of East Asian Studies at Columbia University as well as an affiliate of Columbia’s Institute of Comparative Literature and Society. He earned a license in Chinese language and civilization at France’s Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO) as well as an MA in Asian Cultures and Languages from the University of Texas at Austin.
He is currently writing a dissertation exploring the cultural practices of thinkers who committed, body and pen, to the revolutionary transformation of China’s agrarian society, from participating in land reform to the creation of communes. He recently completed dissertation research in archives across the PRC, particularly Hunan and Shanxi provinces, as well as in Shanghai, Beijing, and Tokyo, with the support of an International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council.
Having trained as a classical actor at the Guthrie Theater and performed for several years in France, Harlan has an avid interest in theatre and other forms of live performance. Additional research areas include Marxist thought, political economy, and histories of revolutionary internationalism. He also enjoys translation and has published several texts by Chinese thinkers like Li Tuo, Zhang Jishun, and co-translations of several essays by historian Wang Hui.
Publications
“The ‘Liang Village Series’: Postsocialist Dynamics of Liang Hong's Rural Investigation”.
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture
. November, 2019.
Select Translations
Li, Tuo. “Twenty-First Century Confusion: A Discussion of Pandemic and Contemporary Capitalism”. Boundary II. Forthcoming in spring, 2021.
Wang, Hui. "Twentieth-Century China as an Object of Thought: An Introduction, Part 1 The Birth of the Century: The Chinese Revolution and the Logic of Politics” and “Part 2 The Birth of the Century: China and the Conditions of Spatial Revolution". Co-translation with Benjamin Kindler. Modern China. October, 2019.
Wang, Hui. “The Prophecy and Crisis of October”. Co-translation with Benjamin Kindler. The South Atlantic Quarterly. October 2017.