Steve Riep specializes in modern and contemporary Chinese literature, film, and culture. Prior to coming to BYU, he taught at the University of California, Los Angeles; California State University, East Bay; and at the University of California, Davis, where he was a postdoctoral faculty fellow from 2001-2003. He lived and traveled in Asia for more than seven years including spending a year as a Rotary International Foundation Ambassadorial Fellowship recipient (1987-1988) and a year as a Fulbright Research Fellow and American Council of Learned Societies-Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Dissertation Fellow (1994-1995) in Taipei, Taiwan. His current research projects explore the relationship between religion and women's emancipation in the short stories of the May Fourth-era writer Xu Dishan, emerging ecocritical consciousness in the essays of the Taiwan writer Yang Mu, and the depiction of visual disabilities in post-Mao Chinese cinema. His long term book project focuses on literature and visual culture under Nationalist rule in Taiwan from 1949-1999.

Positions

• International Cinema Advisory Committee
• Asian Studies Executive Committee
• Faculty Advisor, The Rice Papers (Asian studies student journal)

Degrees

• B.A., University of California, Berkeley (Chinese and Political Economy)
• M.A./Ph.D., UCLA (East Asian Languages and Cultures/Modern Chinese Literature)

Research Interests

• Modern and contemporary Chinese literature
• Transnational Chinese film
• Taiwan literature and film
• Cultural production under authoritarian regimes
• Ecocriticism
• The depiction of disability in the creative arts
• War, memory and literature.

Teaching Interests

• Modern and contemporary Chinese literature (fiction, poetry and prose)
• Transnational Chinese film
• Traditional fiction and drama
• Traditional and modern Chinese culture and Chinese language.

Recent Publications

• "Reunification Reconsidered: Rethinking Recovery of the Mainland in Post-1949 Fiction and Film from Taiwan." In The Proceedings of the 2006 UCSB Conference in Taiwan Studies: Taiwan Literature and History, Center for Taiwan Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara, 2007, pp. 133-154.
• "The View from the Buckwheat Field: Capturing War in the Poetry of Ya Xian." In Christopher Lupke, ed., New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry, edited by Christopher Lupke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 47-64.
• "Xu Dishan." In Thomas Moran, ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography: Modern Chinese Fiction Writers, 1900-1949 Volume 328, Bruccoli Clark Layman, Inc. for Gale Research, 2007, pp. 250-256.
• "Blindness and Insight: Global Views and Local Visions of Visual Disability in Recent Chinese Cinema." Published in the Proceedings of the Chinese Film Centennial Conference "National, Transnational and International: Chinese Cinema and Asian Cinema in the Context of Globalization," Peking University and Shanghai University, Volume 1 (Beijing I), June 2005, pp. 161-167.
• "Religion Reconsidered: Redemption and Women's Emancipation in Xu Dishan's 'The Merchant's Wife' and 'Yuguan.'" Literature and Belief 24: 1 & 2 (2004), pp. 101-115.
• "Chinese Modernism: The New Sensationists." In Joshua Mostow, ed., The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature, Columbia University Press, 2003, pp. 418-424.