Wenyan Gu

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Fudan University

Wenyan Gu is a scholar of comparative literature whose research focuses on modern Sino-German literary and cultural relations, world literature, and the circulation and transformation of images of China in German-language literature and cinema. Her work examines how literature, film, translation, and other forms of cultural mediation have shaped encounters between China and the German-speaking world from the late nineteenth century to the present. Combining comparative literary studies with intellectual history, cultural history, and film studies, she is particularly interested in the ways images of cultural others are produced, circulated, and transformed under changing historical and political conditions.

Her first academic monograph, Dialectical Literary Observations: Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature in the German-Speaking World (Bianzhengxing de wenxue shouwang: Zhongguo xiandangdai wenxue zai Deyu shijie, 2022), examines the translation, reception, and interpretation of modern and contemporary Chinese literature in German-speaking countries. Moving between individual writers, translators, critics, and institutions, the book explores how Chinese literature enters another literary system and how its meanings are reshaped through translation, criticism, publishing, and changing conceptions of China.

Building on her interest in the cultural history of Sino-German encounters, Gu’s current book project, Images of China in Weimar Cinema and Literature, examines the remarkable proliferation of Chinese themes in German-language culture during the Weimar period. Bringing literary texts into dialogue with silent and early sound cinema, the project investigates representations of China in relation to Orientalism, colonialism, racial discourse, memories of the Boxer Rebellion, and the political and cultural transformations of the 1920s and early 1930s. More broadly, the project asks how an imagined China became a medium through which German culture negotiated questions of modernity, revolution, race, gender, and its own changing place in the world after the First World War.

A second strand of Gu’s research concerns German-speaking Jewish refugees in wartime Shanghai and their encounters with Chinese society. Drawing on literature, archival materials, cinema, and documentary film, this work examines how the experiences of exile and everyday encounters between Jewish refugees and Chinese residents from the 1930s through the immediate postwar period have been represented and remembered. Together with Joanne Cho and Birgit Maier-Katkin, Gu is currently developing a collaborative monograph on the history and cultural memory of German-speaking Jewish refugees in Shanghai. The project seeks to bring German, Chinese, and Jewish perspectives into conversation, paying particular attention to the complexities of intercultural encounter, displacement, urban coexistence, and the later construction of Shanghai as a site of refugee memory.

Alongside her academic research, Gu is a literary critic and fiction writer. Her collection of literary criticism, The Poetics of Contingency (Ouran de shixue, Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2025), brings together essays on modernity, literature, cinema, and contemporary cultural life. Her fiction includes the novels Ten People on a Lonely Reef (shi ren gudu jiao, 2012) and Paranoia (pian zhi kuang, 2015), the short-story collection Diving In (yi yue er xia, 2024), the novella collection Dimu (2026), and the short-story collection New Humans (xin ren lei, 2026). Moving between academic scholarship and creative writing, her work is shaped by a sustained interest in how individuals experience modernity across languages, cultures, historical ruptures, and everyday life.

Gu received her doctoral training in Chinese literature at Fudan University, including a period of joint research at the University of Cologne, following earlier studies in German and comparative literature at the University of Göttingen and Philosphy at State University of New York at Binghamton. Her research has taken her to archives and academic institutions in Germany and elsewhere, and she regularly participates in international collaborations on comparative literature, German studies, and Sino-European cultural relations.