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East Asian Languages & Literatures
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Leting Zheng

Ph.D. candidate
East Asian Languages, School of Global Studies and Languages
letingz@uoregon.edu
Research Interests: Modern Chinese literature and history, transnational children’s studies, media and visual culture (magazines, films, and comics), affect theory, gender studies, colonial studies
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Biography

Leting Zheng is a PhD candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Oregon.She has published her research on Journal of Chinese Cinemas and Children’s Literature Association Quarterly.  Her research is supported and recognized by the Oregon Humanities Center Graduate Research Support Fellowship and Oregon Humanities Center Dissertation Fellowship. Additionally, it received the top prize at the Asian Studies Research Event and the Asian Studies Awards at the University of Oregon.

 

Her dissertation investigates the shifting cultural and political constructions of children’s happiness, tracing its evolution from a bourgeois / commercial fantasy in early Republican China to a propagandistic tool in Maoist China. Besides her dissertation project, she is now working on two new manuscripts: one on children’s sex education and the other on the comparative studies on China and Indian periodicals on gender and womanhood.

Education

M.A. Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Colorado Boulder

B.A. Chinese Languages and Literature, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China

Publications

Peer-reviewed articles:

Zheng, L. (Forthcoming) “The Visibility and Visuality of Children in Modern China: Cuteness, Play, and Outer Spatiality in Children’s Magazines,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 50.1

Zheng, L. (2025) “‘Documenting’ Happiness of Labor for The Great Leap Forward: Children’s Film and the Making of Modern Socialist Childhood,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas, https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2025.2524291

(If you’re interested in reading this article, I’m happy to share the accepted version upon request - just let me know.)

Teaching

University of Oregon

2020-present

Language Courses: 

CHN 101 First Year Chinese 

CHN 201/204, 202/204, 203/206 Second Year Chinese 

CHN 302 Third Year Chinese

 

Literature / Film / Culture / Courses:

CHN 150 Introduction to Chinese Narratives

CHN 151 Introduction to Chinese Film

CHN 152 Introduction to Pop Culture 

CHN 305 History of Chinese Literature (Beginnings to The Third Century CE) 

CHN 306 History of Chinese Literature (Third to Eighteenth Centuries) 

CHN 307 History of Chinese Literature (Late Qing to The Twentieth Century) (Spring 2022) 

ASIA 350 What is Asia? 

 

University of Colorado Boulder 

CHN 1020 Beginning Chinese 

CHN 2110 Intermediate Chinese 

CHN 3110/3120 Advanced Chinese