Yurou Zhong

Yurou Zhong is an associate professor of modern Chinese literature and culture. She has been primarily concerned with how the question of script and writing impacts languages, literatures and cultures, with a focus on China. Her first book Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916–1958 (Columbia University Press, 2019) examines how movements that sought to eradicate Chinese characters conditioned the making of a new national literature. The book received the Honorable Mention of Association for Asian Studies’ Joseph Levenson Book Prize and has a revised Chinese edition Hanzi geming (Sanlian shudian, 2024).  

Zhong is currently working on a project that seeks to bridge the analog and the digital in seals—Chinese and otherwise—and to reconceptualize the logographic form as the technological infrastructure of our increasingly digitized world as well as its potential antidote. 

She is also the senior editor of Oxford Research Encyclopedia’s series “Literatures of the Sinosphere.”