Kaiyi (Cathy) Shen

Bio

Cathy Shen (沈剀亦) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She studies medieval literature with a focus on the poetry of the Northern and Southern Dynasties to Tang. Her dissertation project explores the development of social and literary conceptions of privacy and private space in the Mid-Tang through analysis of 8th-9th century poetry on the topic of domesticity and the home. Shen’s research highlights an unexplored inflection point in Chinese literary history and points to changing contemporary constructions of selfhood and individual experience in the middle period.

Research Interests: Pre-Modern Chinese literature and poetry; Social space theory; Gender studies