Peng Xu 徐芃

Peng Xu (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2014) is an associate professor in the Institute of Humanities at ShanghaiTech University, China. Before ShanghaiTech, she taught Asian voice and performance at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and Classical Chinese literature at Swarthmore College. She was also a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley.  She holds a B.A. in traditional bibliography and M.A. in classical Chinese literature from Peking University. In addition to her scholarly focus on premodern Chinese drama and theater, Dr. Xu was trained by a master of Peking opera, Liu Zengfu (1914-2012), in the vocal styles known as the “Old Tan" and "New Tan,” popular in the early twentieth century. She studied with great amateur artists of kunqu opera in the Beijing Kunqu Learned Society. Her own singing style manifests significant connections between the two heritages of vocal music. Since 2010 she has traveled to deliver lecture/demonstrations in various academic institutions in the U.S.