Biography
Elvin Meng is a joint PhD student in Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Before coming to the University of Chicago, he received his degrees in English and Mathematics from the Johns Hopkins University.
Broadly speaking, his research is situated in the disciplines of literary studies, media studies, and intellectual history. His published writings have dealt with the media history of modernist Anglophone literature, censorship and digital media, the history of Chinese grammatology, and multilingual manuscripts from the Qing empire. His current research interests include (early) modern intellectual history, media theory and history, translation studies, history of reading, and the literary history of Northeast Asia.
His dissertation, tentatively titled The Miraculation of Language: A Genealogy of Translation and Subjectivity in the Qing Empire, historicizes the concept and practices of Sino-Manchu language learning of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It explores the various transformations that (mostly-Ruist) theorizations of language, politics, and subjectivity underwent upon the multilingualization of empire, as well as the media ecologies of language that had emerged alongside those philosophical developments.
Publications
Barbarism as Method (Elvin Meng's blog)
Review of Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age by Uluğ Kuzuoğlu. Pacific Affairs: An International Review of Asia and the Pacific 98, no. 2 (2025). Forthcoming.
“Three Manchu Manuscripts in the East Asian Collection of the University of Chicago Library,” East Asian Publishing and Society 15, no. 2 (2025). Forthcoming.
“Ioi Cung’s Manchu Lessons, 1913–1919,” Research note. Saksaha: A Journal of Manchu Studies 20 (2024): 43–63.
“4’’ x 6’’ Time Machines: Nabokovian Mnemotechnics and Interwar Psychical Research,” Modernism/modernity 32, no. 2 (April 2024): 213–233.
“Zheng Qiao’s Grammatology,” In Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century. Proceedings, edited by Yannis Haralambous, 689–737. Grapholinguistics and Its Applications, Vol. 10. Brest: Fluxus Éditions, 2024.
“Viral Text: Translation, Censorship, Community,” In Digital China: Creativity and Community in the Sinocybersphere, edited by Jessica Imbach, 249–268. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024.
“Reintroducing the Sirens’ Fugue,” James Joyce Quarterly 60, no. 4 (Summer 2023): 527–548.
Teaching Experience
Teaching Assistant (University of Chicago):
EALC 29980/39980 Books in Japan from the Earliest Times to the 1890s
EALC 27512/37512 Dream of the Red Chamber: Forgetting About the Author
EALC 21855/31855 Exile and Chinese Poetry
Teaching Assistant (Johns Hopkins):
AS.110.212 Honors Linear Algebra
AS.110.202 Calculus III
AS.110.109 Calculus II