Tonglu Li

Associate Professor of Chinese

Contact

Dept:World Languages And Cultures
Email:tongluli@iastate.edu
Office:2244 Pearson
505 Morrill Rd.
Ames IA
50011-2103
Phone:515-294-0836
Website:https://iastate.academia.edu/TongluLi
Vita:https://iastate.box.com/s/1id32qsu5p92o6yv1wyf7rztbw4gjhj0

Area of expertise: Modern Chinese Culture, Modern Chinese Literature

Topics of interest: China Today, Chinese Cultural Traditions, Chinese Film, Chinese for Professions, Chinese Language, Chinese Literature, Classical Chinese

Bio

Originally coming from China, he received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009. He has been teaching Chinese language, literature and culture at ISU since then.

Grants and Awards


  • CEAH Research Scholarship, Iowa State University, 2014, 2017

  • McClain Faculty Fellowship, Iowa State University, 2014

  • LAS Research & Travel Grants, Iowa State University, Spring 2011, 2014, Fall 2014, 2020.

Recent / Major Publications

Book Chapters

  • "The May Fourth Intellectuals and Religion,” New Vocabularies of May Fourth Studies (Ideas, History, and Modern China, 33), eds. Carlos Yu-Kai Lin and Victor H. Mair, Brill. Forthcoming.

  • “Modern Chinese Essays: Zhou Zuoren, Lin Yutang and Others.” The Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature, edited by Gu Ming Dong. Routledge, 2018, pp. 290–302.

  • “Zhao Shuli and Sun Li’s Novels: Chronicles of New Peasantry.” The Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature, edited by Gu Ming Dong. Routledge, 2018, pp. 305–317.

  • “Mo Yan’s Fiction: Human Existence Beyond Good and Evil.” The Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature, edited by Gu Ming Dong. Routledge, 2018, pp. 569–579.


Refereed Journal Articles

  • “A Bibliographical Study of The Complete Works of Sun Li.” Chinese Language and Literature, Accepted.

  • “The Humble Deities and the Kindhearted Human World: On Li Hao’s Novel Legendries of the Kitchen God.” Contemporary Chinese Literature Studies, vol.4(2024).

  • “Building a Cultural Scaffolding for Calligraphy Learning,” University Calligraphy, 5(2021): 60–62.

  • “Mo Yan’s Frog and the Competing Discourses on the Reconstruction of Cultural Memory on Birth and Birth Control.” Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Literature, 15 (2016): 189–220.

  • “Exploring the Cultural Memory of the Common People: Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Mo Yan’s Sandalwood Death (2001).” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 42.1 (2016) 25–48.

  • “‘Stay Loyal to the Earth’: The Transcendental, the Teleological, and the Quotidian in Zhou Zuoren’s (1885-1967) Reflections on Modern Life.” Asia Major, 28, part 2 (2015) 109–145.

  • “Trauma, Play, Memory: Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out and Mo Yan’s Strategies for Writing History as Story.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, 9, no. 2 (2015) 235–258.

  • “The Sacred and the Cannibalistic: Zhou Zuoren’s Critique of Violence in Modern China.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 36 (2014): 25–60.

  • “Beyond the Nation-State Paradigm: On the Reconstruction of Cultural Subjectivity and Universalism in China.” Frontiers of Literary Theory (Wenxue Lilun Qianyan), 11 (2014): 25–53.

  • “To Believe or Not to Believe: Zhou Zuoren’s Alternative Approaches to the Chinese Enlightenment.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Spring 25, no. 1 (2013): 206–26