Martin W. Huang (Professor, Department of East Asian Studies, University of California Irvine)

Professor Huang's on-going project is tentatively titled "Husbands in Mourning: Bereavement, Memory and Gender in Late Imperial China." It concentrates on different kinds of elegiac writings by male literati on their deceased spouses in Ming-Qing China (approximately 16th-19th centuries), examining the questions of how womanhood was constructed and defined by men in a polygamous society and how such male reflections on womanhood in turn helped define these grieving authors’ own manhood in relation to their spouses as well as their male peers.