Professor He Guimei is a quintessential academic. She has spent virtually her entire academic life at Peking University, advancing all the way to her Ph.D. and professorship since being accepted into the prestigious Beijing institution’s Chinese Department as an undergraduate in 1989.
Despite her extended time studying literature, the 55-year-old has never confined herself to “pure literature.” Instead, she advocates expanding what she calls “the imagination of the humanities” to better situate literary questions within the broader matrices of social structures and understand contemporary China from a more holistic viewpoint.
This approach has defined much of her academic career as she researched larger bodies of scholarship to examine narratives on what it means to be Chinese throughout history.
