About:

Hangping Xu is Assistant Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies and, by affiliation, Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prior to joining UCSB, he taught at Middlebury College. He holds a Ph.D. in Chinese Literature from Stanford University, where his teaching was recognized with the Centennial Teaching Award; at Stanford, he also completed a Ph.D. minor in Gender and Sexuality Studies and pursued extensive coursework in Digital Humanities. Comparative and interdisciplinary in orientation, his research interests include modern Chinese literature and popular culture, Asian American literature, comparative and world literature, literary theory, film and new media studies, and political philosophy. With his book Crip China: Ablenationalism and Disability Aesthetics (2026), he has brought crip critique to reexamine modern Chinese literature and culture while helping to transnationalize the field of critical disability studies. The book offers a critical account of Chinese modernism and modernity through the lens of disability, or what he calls “a cripistemology of modern China.” His work in disability studies received the Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars in Disability Studies (Honorable Mention) in 2020. His publications have appeared or are forthcoming in venues including Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC), Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, PRISM: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, Chinese Literature Today, International Comparative Literature, Queer Literature in the Sinosphere, Chinese Poets Since 1949 (Dictionary of Literary Biography), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Cultural History, and A Global History of Literature and the Environment (Cambridge University Press).

He has guest-edited two journal special issues. With Yunte Huang, he co-edited Translatability and Transmediality: Chinese Poetry in/and the World, published in 2023 in PRISM: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature; the introductory essay advances a transmedial approach to Chinese poetry with particular attention to translation and world literary circulation. With Elise Huerta, he co-edited a 2018 special issue of Chinese Literature Today that introduces Yu Xiuhua’s poetry to a wider readership through such lens as disability studies, gender studies, and internet culture. He is among the earliest translators of Yu Xiuhua’s poetry; 12 poems by Yu that he co-translated are included in that issue. He has also translated scholarly work between Chinese and English, including an essay on humanism by He Guimei. He is currently at work on two new book projects. First, Forms of Global China: Toward a New Cultural Studies, approaches “China” as a global narrative onto which competing ideologies are projected—whether as a foil to liberal democracy or as a central figure in contemporary AI geopolitics. It examines how literature and film mediate global narratives of China and develops a theory of formalism attentive to the ways literary and visual forms not only organize works of art but also condition the production of global knowledge. The book’s various chapters focus, respectively, on the essay, the novel of ideas, the short story cycle, speculative fiction, docudrama, and slow cinema. Each chapter considers how a particular form structures knowledge about China, while the book as a whole explores the broader implications of this formalist approach for cultural studies. A second new book project, Toward a Theory of AI-Generated Literature, reconsiders literary theory in the context of generative AI. By placing East Asian AI literary production in dialogue with Euro-American literary institutions, translation platforms, and pedagogical practices, the project intervenes across literary theory, media studies, critical AI studies, and world literature.

He has supervised or is currently supervising doctoral dissertations on topics including self-translation, disability aesthetics, the cultural history of labor, new media studies, and Afro-Chinese cultural politics. His Ph.D. advisees have secured postdoctoral and faculty positions at major universities, including Harvard University and the University of Texas at Austin. He also makes an effort to bring his humanistic knowledge and training to engage with the public. His public-facing work was featured in the UC Television and BBC.

Publications:

Crip China: Ablenationalism and Disability Aesthetics. De Gruyter Brill (2026)

“Crossing the World to Sleep with You: Yu Xiuhua’s Poetry as Performance and Its Cross-Cultural Translatability,” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature (2023) 20 (1): 225–247

“Beyond National Allegory: Mo Yan’s Fiction as World Literature,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 30, no.1  (Spring 2018), pp. 163-89

“Rescuing Nature from the Nation: Ecocritical (Un)Consciousness in Modern Chinese Culture,” A Global History of Literature and the Environment, 2017, Cambridge University Press

Courses Taught:

CHIN/CLIT 82: Modern Chinese Literature and Film

CHIN 176: Chinese Cinema: Nationalism and Globalism

CHIN 40: Chinese and Global Popular Culture

CHIN 267: Queer China, Crip China (Graduate seminar)

CHIN 263: World Literature and Modern China (Graduate seminar)

EACS 4B: Modern East Asian Cultures

INT 84AY: AI, China, and Global Geopolitics

INT 36KX: Disability Aesthetics and Politics in Chinese Literature and Western Music

Professor Xu’s courses are taught in English, with materials provided in English translation. For a glimpse of his classroom, prospective students can watch a video by former student Christian Aceves, created as a final project reflecting on his learning experience in Professor Xu’s film course. Recognizing evolving notions of literacy, Professor Xu also incorporates alternative assignments alongside traditional academic papers, including podcast conversations, TikTok-style videos, and creative writing.