Anna M. Shields

I'm a scholar and teacher of poetry and prose composed in China during the Tang dynasty (618-907), the Five Dynasties era (907-976), and the Northern Song dynasty (976-1127). Though I began as a student of French literature and comparative literature, Tang poetry won me over in college, and I've never looked back. I've been fortunate to teach at six different universities in the U.S., have lived in four different countries, and I am now the Gordon Wu ‘58 Professor of Chinese Studies in the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. As a literary historian, I am most interested in the question of why new literary genres and styles emerge and change, and I attend to social and political history in my scholarship. My current research examines the reception and shaping of the Tang literary legacy after the fall of the dynasty in 907, during the tenth, eleventh, and early twelfth centuries. I read widely in many different literary genres and periods and am something of an Anglophile, with a love of long chatty novels.