Xinmin Liu

Xinmin Liu is an associate professor of Chinese and Comparative Cultures at Washington State University. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Yale in 1997, and is currently teaching Chinese culture, film and language in the Department of Foreign Languages and Cultures at WSU. His teaching and research are chiefly cross-cultural and interdisciplinary, dealing with society, culture and social thought as well as humanity vs. nonhumans.  His first book, Signposts of Self-Realization: Evolution, Sociality and Ethics in Chinese Literary Modernism, was published by Brill, Netherlands in March 2014.

Since 2005, he has intensely engaged in research on cultural geography, nature writing and ecocriticism in China and the West.  Currently, he is completing two book projects: he is finishing a single-author book entitled Agential Landscapes, Interloping Humans: Aspects of China’s Ecocriticism which focuses on the aesthetic, ontological and ethical issues underlying the cluster of land-landscape-living habitats in China.  He is also working on a volume of ecocritical writings named Interlaced Agencies and Material Ecocriticism in China: Re-enchanting Tian ren he yi, which he co-edits with Xin Ning (PhD Rutgers).