Lingyan Liu

Lingyan Liu is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Born and raised in China, she got her BA in Opera, Film, and Literature from Nanchang University and MA in Chinese Modern Literature from Beijing Normal University. She first came to the U.S. as a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania in 2016.

Her research focuses on the global history of late imperial and modern China, sound studies, and Asian American studies. She is currently working on a dissertation provisionally titled Just Call It the Noise: Chinese Operas and the Sounds of China in Race-Making and Modern Citizenship, 1850s-1930s, which explores sonic stigmas attached to Chinese people and Chinese soundscapes. She investigates how the sounds of Chinese opera, Chinese speeches, street hawkers and festival firecrackers were historically constructed as unnatural, unpleasant, jarring, and monstrous both by white listeners and Chinese intellectuals. Funded by the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, she is now fully enjoying the year of writing dissertation. She also writes for a general audience in China.

Advisor: Carol Symes

Co-advisor: Andrea S. Goldman