Jie Li

As a scholar of literary, film, and cultural studies, Jie Li’s research interests center on the mediation of memories in modern China. Her first book, Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (Columbia University Press, 2014, shortlisted for the International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize) excavates a century of memories embedded in two alleyway neighborhoods destined for demolition.  Her second monograph, Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era (Duke University Press, 2020), explores contemporary cultural memories of the 1950s to the 1970s through textual, audiovisual, and material artifacts, including police files, photographs, documentary films, and museums. Her most recent book, Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia University Press, 2023), is a cultural history of Chinese socialist film exhibition, reception, and audiences, including the media networks and environments, discourses, and practices, experiences and memories of film projectionists and their grassroots audiences from the 1940s to the 1980s. Cinematic Guerrillas won the 2024 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award and the 2025 Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.  It was also named a 2024 Choice Outstanding Academic Title and received Honorable Mention for the 2025 Joseph Levenson Book Prize (post-1900) from the Association of Asian Studies.

Besides monographs, Li has co-edited a volume entitled Red Legacies in China: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution (Harvard Asia Center, 2016).  Other publications include “Revolutionary Echoes: Radios and Loudspeakers in the Mao Era”(Twentieth-Century China, 2020); “The Hot Noise of Open-Air Cinema” (Grey Room, 2020);  “1965 Red Prison Files” (A New Literary History of Modern China, 2017); “Are Our Drawers Empty? Nie Gannu’s Dossier Literature” (Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures, 2016);“From Landlord Manor to Red Memorabilia: Reincarnations of a Chinese Museum Town” (co-authored with Denise Y. Ho, Modern China, 2015); “Filming Power and the Powerless” (DV-Made China, 2015); “Phantasmagoric Manchukuo: Documentaries Produced by the South Manchurian Railway Company, 1932-1940” (positions: east asia cultures critique, 2014). 

Li earned an A.B. in East Asian Studies from Harvard College and studied English literature at the University of Cambridge and German literature at the University of Heidelberg before returning to Harvard for a Ph.D. in modern Chinese literary and film studies. She was a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton’s Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. Li teaches courses on East Asian Cinema and Chinese media cultures. She received the 2020 Roslyn Abramson Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at Harvard, which recognizes teachers for excellence and sensitivity in teaching undergraduates. In 2024, she was named a Harvard College Professor for her contributions to undergraduate teaching and a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow for scholarly eminence in the fields of literature, history, or art.