Stanford Humanities Center
Ya Zuo is an associate professor of History at University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a cultural historian of middle and late imperial China. She is the author of Shen Gua’s Empiricism (Harvard University Press, 2018) and a range of articles on subjects such as theory of knowledge, sensory history, medical history, book history, and the history of emotions.
SHC Project
A Thousand Streaks of Tears: Emotion, Identity, and Society in Medieval China (600−1400)
A Thousand Streaks of Tears: Emotion, Identity, and Society in Medieval China (600−1400) is a highly interdisciplinary project which examines the social function of emotional crying, namely, how tears signified social identities and addressed power relationships fundamental to the operation of Chinese state and society. The book narrates with a tran-sregional perspective and places China in the extensive networks of eastern Eurasia. It analyzes how elite men, ethnic minorities, women, and religious practitioners respectively employed lachrymose power to define selfhood and flourish across borders and cultures.
Monograph:
Shen Gua’s Empiricism, Harvard University Asia Center, 2018.
Selected Articles:
“Collecting Tears: Lachrymation and Emotions in the Taiping Collectanea,” Oriens Extremus 59 (2022): 225–279.
“Counting Books by the Juan: Material and Conceptual Aspects of the Chinese Book,” Asia Major 35.1 (2022): 33–73.
“Male Tears in Song China,” Journal of Chinese Studies 73 (2021): 33–79.
“Keeping Your Ear to the Cosmos: Coherence as the Standard of Good Music in the Northern Song (960−1127) Music Reforms,” in Powerful Arguments: Standards of Validity in Late Imperial China, ed. Ari D. Levine, Joachim Kurtz, and Martin Hofmann (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishing, 2020), 277–309.
"Whence Cometh Sad Tears?" article with new media elements, in Fluid Matter(s): Flow and Transformation in the History of the Body, ed. Natalie Köhle and Shigehisa Kuriyama, Asian Studies Monograph Series 14 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2020).
“Zhang Zai’s (1020–1077) Critique of the Senses,” Journal of Chinese History 3 (2019): 83–111.
“‘Ru’ versus ‘Li’: The Divergence between the Generalist and the Specialist in the Northern Song (960−1127),” Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 44 (2014): 83–137.
Research Groups /Projects:
Research Focus Group “Emotions in History,” primary investigator, co-directing with Dr. Hongbo Yu in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, UCSB
