Prof. Beth Harper
MA, Sinology, SOAS, University of London (2018)
PhD, Comparative Literature and Renaissance Studies, Yale University (2016)
International Chinese Language Program, National Taiwan University (2014)
MPhil, European Literature and Culture, Cambridge University (2008)
MA, Classics, Cambridge University (2007)
Assistant Professor
PROFILE
I work across premodern European and Chinese literature and theory, with particular interests in tragedy, lyric, eco-criticism, psychoanalysis, and comparative poetics. My first book Nothing But Time: a child-centred theory of tragedy from Euripides to Racine reframes the European tragic tradition as a meditation on failed futurity. My second book project Mountains, Gardens and the Good Life: Ecological Encounters in Greco-Roman and Chinese Poetics examines how natural environments in the literary cultures of ancient China and the Latin West interact with the lyric form to craft an art of life. Recent work has appeared in Shakespeare, English Studies, postmedieval, Comparative Literature: East & West, The Journal of East-West Thought, the Journal of World Literature and History of Humanities. A committed premodern comparatist, I have undergone training in Latin, Ancient Greek, French, German, Italian and Spanish, as well as classical and modern Chinese.
In Fall 2025, I was a visiting fellow in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. I have given recent invited lectures for Cambridge University’s Department of Classics, Edinburgh University’s World Philosophies series, and for the Academy of Athens. Prior to my appointment in Comparative Literature, I held a post-doctoral fellowship in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at HKU. I have also held a Yale-China Guizishan fellowship at China Central Normal in Wuhan, a teaching fellowship at the École normale supérieure in Lyon, and a researcher-in-residency at the École normale supérieure in Paris.
I have been the recipient of numerous grants and awards to support my research and language training including the H.P. Kraus Fellowship in Early Books and Manuscripts, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; The Elizabethan Club of Yale University Essay Prize; The Richard U. Light Fellowship at Yale University; the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University; the HSBC Scholarship for a fully-funded MA in Sinology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; a Hong Kong UGC Early Career Scheme Award. I have also been an invited delegate at the Yenching Global Symposium, Peking University; Harvard University’s Institute for World Literature; and the Daoist Philosophy Summer School at Beijing Normal University.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
· Comparative Premodern Literature and Philosophy (Chinese and European)
· Tragedy; epic; lyric
PUBLICATIONS (Selected)
2024. “East-West Cross-Cultural Encounters of the Lyric: Horace (BCE 65-8) and Tao Yuanming (CE 365-427)”, Journal of World Literature 9.2: 186-206.
2024. “Quo vadis, Comparative Environmental Humanities?” (with Tristan Brown), History of Humanities 9.1: 99-113.
2023. “Mountains, Meaning, Mediation: Petrarch’s ‘Ascent to Mont Ventoux’ (1336) and the ecological imagination of classical Chinese poetry”, in postmedieval 14: 647-667.
2020. “‘Do not allow an empty goblet to face the moon’: lyrical materialities in the drinking poems of Li Bai 李白（701-762）and Du Fu 杜甫(712-770)”, “Contract Zones: Fur/Flesh/Fabric/Fieldstone”, postmedieval 11.1: 57-67.
2019. “The early modern European (non) reception of the Zhuangzi 莊子 text”, the Journal of East-West Thought, 4.9: 23-37.
2019. ““A disease that’s in my flesh which I must needs call mine”: Lear, Macbeth and the Fear of Futurity”, English Studies, 100.6: 604-626.
2019. “East-West Theories of Tragedy: Transcultural Hauntings in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Ji Junxiang’s 纪君祥 Zhaoshi guer 赵氏孤儿 (The Orphan of Zhao)”, Comparative Literature: East & West, 3.1: 38-52.
2017. “‘And men ne’er spend their fury on a child’ – Killing Children in Shakespeare’s Early Histories”, Shakespeare, 13.3: 193-209.
COURSE(S) TAUGHT
· CLIT 1008 Ways of Reading: an Introduction to the Theory of Literature
· CLIT 2008 World, Text, Critic
· CLIT 2102 The Tragic Imagination
· CLIT 3021 Advanced Studies in Theory: Reading with the Ancients
A recent lecture given for the Edinburgh World Philosophies Series on how gardening invites philosophy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rI2v-Lvkyw