About

I am a writer and a scholar, a practitioner and researcher of imaginative storytelling.

As a fiction writer, I have been awarded MacDowell Fellowships, a Toronto Arts Council Grant, and residencies at Willapa Bay AiR and The Marble House Project. My prose and poems have appeared in journals such as The Fiddlehead, Kenyon Review Online, Nimrod, The Saint Ann’s Review, Santa Monica Review, Salamander, and Washington Square Review. I have written about the immigrant experience, fiction and the sciences, and reviews of dance performances.

As a scholar of Chinese cultural history, I am drawn to thinking about forms of writing with a strong sense of place. My first scholarly monograph, City of Marvel and Transformation, explores the connection between 9th-century Chinese literature and the urban space of the capital city in the Tang dynasty.

At the University of Toronto, I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of cartography, the cultural history of food in East Asia, and literatures of travel. I recently began a new research project, “A Cultural History of Aromatics in late Medieval China,” as part of the Chancellor Jackman Research Fellowships in the Humanities from the Jackman Humanities Institute.