Professor Max Xiaobing Tang

Professor Max Xiaobing Tang was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Arts in September 2019. He was also named Sin Wai Kin Professor of Chinese Humanities. Since February 2020, Professor Tang began serving as Director of the Institute of Chinese Studies.

From 2008 to 2019, Professor Tang was Helmut F. Stern Professor of Modern Chinese Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Before Michigan, Professor Tang taught at the University of Southern California, the University of Chicago, and the University of Colorado, Boulder, from 1991 to 2008.

Professor Tang’s research and scholarly work focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese literature, visual culture, history of art, sound studies, and cultural politics. His publications include Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford University Press, 1996), Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Duke University Press, 2000), and Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement (University of California Press, 2008). His most recent book is Visual Culture in Contemporary China: Paradigms and Shifts (Cambridge University Press, 2015), which was published in Chinese in 2018 and then in Korean in 2020. The Chinese version of Visual Culture was named “One of Ten Best Books of 2018” by The Southern Metropolitan Daily of Guangzhou in December 2018.

Professor Tang’s Chinese publications include Postmodernism and Theories of Culture: Lectures by Professor Fredric Jameson (Shaanxi Teachers University Press, 1986), Re-reading: The People’s Literature and Art Movement and Its Ideology (Oxford University Press of [Hong Kong], 1993) and Speaking of Love: 69 Contemporary American Love Poems (Shanghai Literature and Arts Press, 2021).

In 2022, Professor Tang published Dreams toward Home: Endi Poskovic Printworks, a bi-lingual art book with over 120 images in full colour, through the Zhejiang People's Fine Arts Press. 

From November 2021 to February 2022, Professor Tang curated and produced the second season of Break Out, an online reading and dialogue series sponsored by the Hong Kong Poetry Festival Foundation. The seven episodes of the second season, featuring renowned poets from around the world, were streamed on Ifeng, YouTube, and Facebook and drew altogether over 2,850,000 viewer hits.