Please note: This lecture will be held in person and virtually on Zoom. The webinar is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Once you've registered, joining information will be sent to your email. Register for the Zoom webinar at: https://myumi.ch/mRz1N

Dr. Zhao’s new project investigates the transnational engagements of Chinese dramatists, actors, and intellectuals with world theatre from the 1910s to the 1930s and illustrates how they significantly shaped the global perceptions of Chinese theatre. Through case studies of Chinese dramatists working in the United States, France, and Britain, this talk will present how they articulated their own visions of Chinese theatre, establishing it not as an exotic spectacle but as a site of theoretical experimentation and aesthetic authority. By re-centering Chinese agency within transnational theatre networks, their work reframed Chinese theatre as a constitutive rather than derivative force in global theatre history and laid the groundwork for the forms and debates that continue to shape Chinese theatre today.

Sophia Tingting Zhao (Ph.D., East Asian Languages and Cultures, Stanford University) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures at Virginia Tech, where she also serves as director of the Chinese program. Her research focuses on Chinese theatre and performance, performance historiography, and the intersections of literature, gender, urban space, media, and global modernity, with particular emphasis on transnational Chinese theatre. She is the co-author of three scholarly books on Chinese theatre, including two scholarly editions of traditional poetry on Chinese Kun opera and a scholarly edition of a sixteenth-century dramatic text.

Her forthcoming monograph, “Globalizing Chinese Theatre”《面向世界的中国戏剧》 (Fudan University Press, 2026), examines how Chinese dramatists, performers, and intellectuals engaged transnationally with world theatre and reshaped global narratives of Chinese theatre between 1911 and 1949. She is also the author of Mei Lanfang and Gender Studies 《梅兰芳与女性文化研究》(Beijing Publishing House, 2026), the first book-length gender analysis of female impersonation and theatrical stardom in twentieth-century Chinese theatre. Her article “Wang Guowei’s Weltanschauung: Chinese Theatre in the Age of Globalization” won the 2019 Wang Guowei Award for Academic Paper on Drama. Her scholarship on Mei Lanfang has also been recognized as Top-Ten Papers at the 1st, 2nd, and 7th Mei Lanfang Research Young Scholars Forums. Additional honors include the Emerging Scholar Award from the Association for Asian Performance.