Gal Gvili

Gal Gvili studies and teaches modern and contemporary Chinese literature. Her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in The Journal of Asian Studies, Religions, Comparative Literature Studies, China and Asia: A Journal in Historical Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and the edited volume Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India 1840s-1860s. Her book Imagining India in Modern China: Literary Decolonization and the Imperial Unconscious, 1895-1962 (Columbia University Press, 2022, Winner of the Harry Levin First Book Award in Comparative Literature, ACLA) examines how the image of India, in particular, Chinese writers’ multifaceted visions of Sino-Indian connections, shaped the making of a new literature in the twentieth century.

Her current project, tentatively titled Possessed: Superstition and Gender in Modern Chinese Literature examines how gender and superstition are co-constituted by exploring the literary portrayal of superstitious persons in Chinese literature of the 20^th and 21 centuries. The study contributes a literary perspective to a growing body of scholarship—from religion studies, history, anthropology, gender and women studies—on the historical formation and contemporary endurance of the discursive construct “superstition” in governance, culture, and gendering practices of former colonial spaces.