Li Wanying 李婉荥

Education:
B.A., NanKai University
M.A., Renmin University of China

Research Interest:
Confucianism; Song-Ming Intellectual History; Social and Cultural History

Self-Introduction:
My academic interests lie primarily in Song-Ming intellectual history and social and cultural history. I am particularly interested in the interactions between intellectual ideas and the lived worlds of the literati, and in how ideas were understood, practiced, and reshaped within specific historical contexts. I have a longstanding interest in the concrete and subtle experiences of life that underlay intellectual thought, as well as in how individuals understood and shaped themselves within inherited experiences, ideas, and forms of order. For me, studying the past is not only a way of understanding another time, but also a way of understanding people, ourselves, and the world in which we live.

Thesis Advisor: Prof Ong Chang Woei

Thesis Title: A Neo-Confucian Literatus in an Age of Change: A Study of Lin Xiyuan in Mid-Ming China

Thesis Research Area:
My current research takes the mid-Ming Neo-Confucian literatus Lin Xiyuan as a point of departure to examine how the Neo-Confucian tradition responded to new historical realities amid the commercial expansion, growing maritime connections, and transformations of local society in sixteenth-century China. More broadly, I am interested in questions of continuity and adaptation within intellectual traditions, and in the relationship between intellectual thought and social change.