Nellie Yang

Nellie Ting Yang’s research interest lies in late imperial Chinese fiction and leisure culture. Empathetic with late imperial Homo ludens, she approaches leisure, entertainment and pleasure-seeking not so much through socio-economic lenses but as literary problems, exploring how literary representations discriminate, sometimes arbitrarily, between guilty pleasure and high-brow leisure. She also looks into Ming Qing board/card/drinking games, with the hope of redeeming them from past moralistic verdicts and take seriously their potential to offer a healthy dose of non-reality. She received her B.A. from the Chinese Literature Department of National Taiwan University prior to joining Yale EALL.