Linhe Li

Linhe Li 李林壑 is a second-year PhD student in premodern Chinese literature, working on medieval poetry and poetics with particular attention to the Sui dynasty (581–618). Brief but pivotal, the Sui reunified north and south after centuries of division, bringing long-divergent literary traditions into sustained contact. Routinely dismissed as a mere interlude between the Six Dynasties and the Tang, it in fact affords a privileged vantage on the making of a shared literary culture.

Her current project asks how verse mapped the Sui empire. Through campaign poems, poetic performances of emperorship, and verse composed at imperial command, she traces how poetry lent spatial form to political order, rendering the realm as terrain to be traversed, subdued, and possessed and how cosmic and oceanic registers extended empire’s imagined reach beyond rivers, mountains, and frontier garrisons.

Her MA thesis, “Wrought into Historical Contemplation: Configuring Ruins in Early Medieval Chinese Poetry,” examined sixth-century Liang, Chen, and Sui court poets’ renderings of ruined cities, palaces, temples, and residences, sites that gathered and mediated memories of dynastic rise and fall, becoming both foci and loci for reflection on historical change.

Her wider interests include travel writing, the crystallization of lyric moments in the so-called “frontier poetry,” landscape poetry, historical geography, as well as religious and funerary arts.

Publications:
-    「靈山只在汝心頭」——試論世德堂百回本《西遊記》對於「心」的哲學探索, “Spirit Mountain Lies Only in Your Own Mind”: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Philosophical Exploration of the Mind (xin) in the Hundred-Chapter Shidetang Xiyou ji, Eruditus大學海, vol. 8 (2019), pp. 26-35.
-    文本的內在衝突：試考〈招魂〉魂主及作者, Internal Conflict of the Texts: Examining the Owner of the Soul and the Authorship of “Summons of the Soul” in the Elegies of Chu, Eruditus大學海, vol. 6 (2018), pp. 20-28.

Selected Presentations:
-    “Wrought into Withered Wistfulness: Configuring Ruins in Sixth-Century Chinese Poetry,” in the session “The Medieval City Lament,” 59th International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS), West Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Kathryn M. Karrer Travel Award winner.
-    “Wrought into Historical Contemplation: Configuring Ruins in the Poetry of Southern Liang and Chen (502-589 CE),” in the panel “Emotions in Literature,” 2023 Western Branch Conference of the American Oriental Society (WBAOS), Portland State University.
-    “Into the Multipolar Borderlands of the Tang Empire: Taking the Poetic Autobiographies of Wang Changling and an Anonymous Envoy to Tubo as Examples,” in the panel “State and Society in Imperial China,” 2022 New York Conference on Asian Studies (NYCAS), Syracuse University.