Ellen Widmer

Center Associate; Mayling Soong Professor Emerita of Chinese Studies and Professor Emerita of East Asian Studies, Wellesley College

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Department Website

Bio

Professor Ellen Widmer (魏愛蓮) studies traditional Chinese fiction, history of Chinese women’s writing, history of the book in China, and missionaries to East Asia. Trained in the history of traditional Chinese fiction, Professor Widmer has worked hard to bring women into the picture of Chinese literature. As she says, “There were not many women who wrote fiction, but many consumed it as readers and wrote about it in their poetry. The great eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber takes writing women as its subject and so blends these two streams of my work in another way.” Professor Widmer also researches the history of the Chinese book and individual bookshops, as well as the outreach of colleges like Wellesley and Wesleyan University in Middleton, Connecticut to Christian colleges in China, Japan, and Korea.

Prior to her retirement, Professor Widmer served as Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Wellesley College.

Research Interests: Women’s writings of the Ming and Qing, especially the seventeenth century; Protestant missionary interactions with China, especially the nineteenth century; the history of the book, especially as it augments understanding of her two main research areas.

Selected Publications

Books

  • Fiction’s Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai, and the Business of Women in Late-Qing China (2016)
  • The Beauty and the Book (2006)
  • The Margins of Utopia (1987)

Recent Articles and Chapters

  • Widmer, Ellen. “Sounds and Silences: Lin Daiyu’s Experience of the Qin in Honglou Meng,” in The Sensorium of the Early Modern Chinese Text, eds. Ariel Fox, Paize Keulemans, Suyoung Son, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2026.       
  • “Mingyuan shiwei, Zhang Hao, and Wang Duanshu’s Editorial Hand,” Nan Nü 2025, pp. 27-76.  A follow-up article “On Second Thought, ‘Mingyuan shiwei, Zhang Hao, and Wang Duanshu’s Editorial Hand,’ is in preparation for the next issue of the same journal.
  • Widmer, Ellen. “Intercultural Mutuality: Mary Hannah Fulton and Zhang Zhujun,” in Gender and Friendship in Chinese Literature, Wai-yee Li, ed., Leiden, Brill, 2024, pp. 177-201.
  • Widmer, Ellen. “Shan Shili” in Creators of Modern China, Jessica Hall, ed., London: Thames and Hudson, 2023: 197-99.
  • Widmer, Ellen. “Schooling the Blind and Deaf of China: Mary West Niles (1854-1933), Annetta Thompson Mills (1853-1929), and Their Legacies,” Journal of American East Asian Relations 2023-03, Vol 25(1), pp. 44-71.
  • Widmer, Ellen. “Beyond the Inner Chambers: Xu Zhaohua and Her Teacher Mao Qiling,” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 10 (2023-4), pp. 11-29.
  • Widmer, Ellen. “A Source from Afar: Traces of Sarah K. Bolton’s Lives of Girls Who Became Famous (1886) in Tang Baorong’s Huang Xiuqiu (1905-7),”  Nan Nü (2023): 44-71.
  • Widmer, Ellen. “  “Promotion, Patronage, and Poetic Socialization: The Tongqiu Society and Its Role in Wang Duanshu’s Shaoxing Years,” Late Imperial China, Vol 41, No 2 (December 2020), 95-130.
  • Widmer, Ellen. “Medical Translation in Canton, 1850-1918,” in China and the World, The World and China –A Transcultural Perspective, Barbara Mittler, Natascha Gentz, Joachim Gentz, Catherine V. Yeh, eds, Gossenberg: Ostasian Verlag, 2019.
  • Widmer, Ellen. “Reacting and Overreacting: Readers’ Responses to ‘Women’s Journals As Gleaned from ‘Women’s Novels’ of the Late Qing,” in Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Long Twentieth Century: A Space of Their Own, Michel Hockx, Joan Judge, and Barbara Mittler, eds., Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 93-98.
  • Widmer, Ellen. “Learning from Editions: Nü yuhua [Female Jail Flower] As Seen in Two Early Printings,” Texts and Transformations: Essays in Honor of the 75th Birthday of Victor H. Mair, ed., Haun Saussy, Cambria Press, 2018, pp. 197-236.
  • Widmer, Ellen. Review article “Gender and the Public Sphere in Modernizing East Asia,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 77.2 (December, 2017), pp. 447-63.
  • Widmer, Ellen. “Women Writers in Early Modern China.” In A New Literary History of Modern China, edited by David Der-Wei Wang, 103–8. Harvard University Press, 2017.

Media