Michael Gibbs Hill teaches courses in Chinese language, literature, and culture and comparative literature. His research focuses on the history of mental labor and intellectual work in modern China, and his scholarly publications cover such areas as modern and late imperial Chinese literature; translation and adaptation; publishers in turn-of-the-century China; classical Chinese prose in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and attempts to reform, abolish, or supplement the Chinese written language. His first book, Lin Shu, Inc.: Making an Icon in Modern China, is under contract with Oxford University Press. Professor Hill has held fellowships from the USC Provost’s Arts and Humanities Grant Program, the American Council of Learned Societies, the US-IIE Fulbright program, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and the Blakemore Foundation.
Education
BA, Fairhaven College at Western Washington University, 1996
MA, Comparative Literature, Rutgers University, 2003
PhD, East Asian Studies, Columbia University, 2008
Areas of interest
Modern and Late Imperial Chinese Culture
History of Authorship and Publishing
Translation Studies and Technologies of Translation
Language and Script Reform
Comparative Literature
Selected Courses
Imagining Modern China: History, Culture, Politics
The Business of Culture in Modern China
Modern Misreadings: Translation, Imitation, and Borrowing
Modern Chinese Literature
First-Year Mandarin Chinese
Selected Research Publications
Lin Shu, Inc.: Making an Icon in Modern China. Under contract with Oxford University Press.
“Between English and the National Language: The English Student, English Weekly, and the Commercial Press’s Correspondence Schools.” Accepted pending revisions for Modern Chinese Literature and Culture.
“No True Men in the State: Translation, Pseudo-translation, and ‘Feminine’ Voice in the Late Qing.” Forthcoming in Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese / Xianddai Zhongwen wenxue xuebao.
“Pingyunde shoulie lüxing: zaoqi Zhou Zuoren jiqi xingbiehua de ‘ganshi youguo’ jingshen” (Duckweed Cloud’s safari: the early Zhou Zuoren and his gendered “obsession with China”). Trans. Zhu Yun. In Xiandai Zhongguo xiaoshuo de shi yu xue: xiang Xia Zhiqing xiansheng zhijing(The history and study of modern Chinese fiction: essays in honor of C. T. Hsia), ed. David Der-wei Wang (Taipei: Lianjing, 2010), 133–152.
“Guihua fanyide jiexian: yi Lin Shu Yisuo yuyan yiben wei li” (The limits of domestication: a study of Lin Shu’s version of Aesop’s Fables). Dongya renwen (Humanities East Asia), ed. Dong Bingyue (Beijing: Sanlian), no. 1 (2008): 283–302.
“National Classicism: Lin Shu as Textbook Writer and Anthologist, 1908–1924.” Twentieth-Century China 33, no. 3 (November 2007): 27–52.
