Welcome!
My name is Huiqiao Yao 姚惠橋. I am a scholar of religion, literature, and print culture in early modern China, with a focus on the hagiographic construction of Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472–1529) and the broader production of religious and cultural authority. I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sinology and Chinese Studies at Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU, 北京語言大學), and a Junior Fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School.
You can download my most recent CV here.
My current book project, The Sage and His Hagiographies: Writing Wang Yangming as Late Ming Culture, examines how the life of the iconic Confucian thinker Wang Yangming was rewritten across diverse late Ming genres. It argues that Wang’s sagehood was produced not through philosophy alone, but through the intertwined forces of religious imagination, literary form, and print culture. In doing so, the project uses Wang Yangming’s hagiographies as a new lens for understanding the making of cultural authority in early modern China. I am also developing a separate project on late Ming deity encyclopedias, as well as another on the cultural dissemination of morality literature.
Before joining BLCU, I held an ASIANetwork-Luce Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at Trinity University. I received my Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from the University of Arizona in 2023, an M.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University in 2016, and a B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature from Renmin University of China in 2014.
In addition to my academic work, I am a modern poet, an avid live theater goer, and a dedicated collector of Japanese enka records. Please feel free to contact me at huiqiaoyao@arizona.edu (preferred), huiqiaoyao@blcu.edu.cn, or through the contact form.