User:CWH/Ellen Widmer

Ellen Brown Widmer 魏愛蓮 (b. 1939 - ) is an American scholar of Chinese literature and Mayling Soong Professor of Chinese Studies; Professor of East Asian Studies, Wellesley College.

Her interests include traditional Chinese fiction, history of Chinese women's writing, history of the book in China, and missionaries to East Asia, and has worked to bring women and their role as authors.

She is an associate of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She received American Council of Learned Societies grants in in 1987, 1994, and 2008.

Education
Widmer received her undergraduate degree from Wellesley College. them went on to earm an MA from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. She taught at Wesleyan University in Connecticut before coming to Wellesley.

She is divorced from the China scholar and educator Eric Widmer. Their younger son Matthew is also an educator, and their older son, Edward Widmer, is a scholar of American literature and an educational administrator.

Studies of the novel in late imperial China
Her initial book was a study of Shuihu Houzhuan, a neglected sequel to Water Margin written in the early Qing dynasty, which was the first major study of the novel. Robert E. Hegel, writing in Journal of Asian Studies, said

There were not many women who wrote fiction, but many consumed it as readers and wrote about it in their poetry. The great eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber takes writing women as its subject and so blends these two streams of my work in another way. The history of the Chinese book is another area of specialization. My several studies of individual bookshops emerge from this interest. Finally I have written on the outreach of colleges like Wellesley and Wesleyan University in Middleton, Connecticut to Christian colleges in China, Japan, and Korea.

I am keenly interested in administration at the departmental level. Questions like how to combine Chinese, Japanese, and Korean in one department; how to help language and literature faculty interact with one another; how to adapt courses to reflect the changing profiles of East Asian countries --all these go into the mix of making Wellesley's available assets work to best advantage. As department chair I probably spend as much time thinking about such matters as I spend on my research and teaching.

Of her 2006 monograph, The Beauty and the Book, one reviewer wrote that Widmer "gives us the fruits of over fifteen years of research in many of the major and minor rare book collections in East Asia and the United States," and that she has "distilled what are often the slighest of textual traces into a complex and rish picture of women's writing and women's writing communiities in late imperial China."

Articles and chapters

 * Ellen Widmer, "The Huanduzhai of Hangzhou and Suzhou: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Publishing," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 56 (1996): 77 - 122
 * Ellen Widmer, "The Trouble with Talent: Hou Zhi (1764-1829) and Her Tanci Zai Zaotian 再 造 天 of 1828," Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 21 (1999): 131-150. http://www.jstor.org/stable/495249
 * Ellen Widmer, "Foreign Travel through a Woman's Eyes: Shan Shili's "Guimao Lüxing Ji" in Local and Global Perspective," The Journal of Asian Studies 65.4 (2006): 763-791. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25076129


 * Ellen Widmer. Ming Loyalism and the Woman's Voice in Fiction after Hong Lou Meng., 1997).  ISBN

Edited volumes

 * Judith T. Zeitlin, Lydia He Liu and Ellen Widmer. Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan. (Cambridge, MA: Published by Harvard University Asia Center for Harvard-Yenching Institute: distributed by Harvard University Press, Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series; 58, 2003).  ISBN  0674010981
 * W. L. Idema, Li Wai-Yee . Trauma and Transcendence in Early Qing Literature. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).   ISBN  0674017757 9780674017757.
 * with Daniel H. Bays, China's Christian Colleges: Cross-Cultural Connections, 1900-1950. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).   ISBN
 * with
 * W. L. Idema, Li Wai-Yee . Trauma and Transcendence in Early Qing Literature. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).   ISBN  0674017757 9780674017757.
 * with Daniel H. Bays, China's Christian Colleges: Cross-Cultural Connections, 1900-1950. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).   ISBN
 * with

Translations

 * Bereznyi L. A. . An Unauthorized Digest of L.A. Bereznii, a Critique of American Bourgeois Historiography on China : Problems of Social Development in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries : (Published by Leningrad University, 1968), 261 Pp. (Cambridge, Mass.: Distributed by East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1969).   ISBN
 * Guanzhong Luo, translated by Patrick Hanan, Introduction by Ellen B. Widmer. Quelling the Demons' Revolt a Novel from Ming China. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).  ISBN  9780231183062.