Center for Chinese Studies

Read the Spring 2026 CCS Chair's Greetings!

January 14, 2026

Spring 2026 CCS Chair's Greetings

Call for Proposals: 2026 Berkeley Center for Chinese Studies Social Sciences Graduate Research Conference

January 12, 2026

https://ieas.berkeley.edu/berkeley-center-chinese-studies-social-science...

Apply Now! - Academic Explorers in China Program for Undergraduates in Summer 2026

December 11, 2025

Apply Now! - Academic Explorers in China Program for Undergraduates in Summer 2026

In the summer of 2026, Peking University (PKU) will continue to host the Academic Explorers in China Program, in collaboration with partner universities in the U.S., as part of the China Deep Dive: Global Young Leaders Program. Participants will attend lectures on the PKU campus and participate in guided excursions in and around Beijing. Students from PKU will also join the program, fostering mutual understanding of cultures and values. This initiative aims to...

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Call for Proposals: 2026 Berkeley-Stanford Graduate Student Conference in Modern Chinese Humanities

September 17, 2025

Berkeley - Stanford Graduate Student Conference in Modern Chinese Humanities
April 10-11, 2026
UC Berkeley

Initiated in 2010, the annual Berkeley-Stanford Graduate Student Conference in Modern Chinese Humanities brings together current graduate students from across the U.S. and around the world to present innovative research on any aspect of modern Chinese cultural production in the humanistic disciplines. Read more

CCS Working Groups

The Center for Chinese Studies Working Group program is in support of research in the humanities and the social sciences, and provide opportunities for smaller groups of Berkeley faculty and advanced graduate students to share their research in progress, garner thoughtful and detailed feedback on papers or grants, brainstorm new projects, and discuss the latest published research related to their working group.

The Working Group awards range from $250-$750 for the academic year. New Working Groups have one full year to use the award funds. The funds can be used...

Elaine Zhu

CCS Undergraduate Student Liaison
Comparative Literature and English

Elaine Zhu (朱庭萱) currently double majors in Comparative Literature and English as an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley. Their academic pursuits include modern and translated literature in the Sinosphere, with a focus on queer studies.

Sophie Volpp

CCS Faculty Chair / Professor
East Asian Languages and Cultures
Department of Comparative Literature

Sophie Volpp is professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature. She works in Chinese literature of the 16th through 19th centuries, and is the author of Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth-Century China (Harvard, 2011) and The Substance of Fiction: Literary Objects in China, 1550-1775 (Columbia, 2022). She has also translated the work of pre-modern women poets and dramatists. She is currently at work on two projects: a book about the efforts of the...

Skye VanValkenburgh

Program Coordinator
Center for Chinese Studies
Institute of East Asian Studies

Skye VanValkenburgh (吴思凯) manages all aspects of the Visiting Scholar Program at the Center for Chinese Studies (CCS). She earned her B.A. in Chinese from San Francisco State University and is an alumni of the Chinese Language Flagship Program. As part of the Flagship Program, Skye studied Chinese language and culture intensively at National Taiwan University, conducted several summer internships in Taiwan, and completed a yearlong intensive language capstone at Nanjing University, which included a six-month internship as the Program Assistant for the American Councils Chinese Language...

Forum on Reconsidering the History of the Analects and other "Confucius said" Texts in light of Recent Discoveries of Unearthed Manuscripts

For the last hundred years, China has witnessed an unprecedented number of archeological and unprovenanced artifacts from the last millennium BCE. These documents offer unique a window into the production of writing media, scribal habits, and material cultures. The texts inscribed on these artifacts broaden our understanding of the ancient Chinese intellectual world out of which the canonical tradition was produced. Reconsidering the History of the Analects and other "Confucius said" Texts in light of Recent Discoveries of Unearthed Manuscripts was organized by Prof. Mark Csikszentmihalyi,...