Nieh Hualing (1925-2024) was a Chinese-born writer, poet, and editor whose career bridged multiple cultures and continents. Born in Wuhan, she lived through the upheavals of the Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War before moving to Taiwan, where she established herself as a prominent literary figure.
Her marriage to fellow writer Paul Engle eventually brought her to the United States, where the couple co-founded the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 1967, an initiative that brought writers from around the world to the Midwest.
Nieh’s own creative work, including her novel Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China, blends autobiography with fiction, capturing the dislocation, resilience, and identity struggles of women caught between cultures and histories. She also wrote memoirs such as Three Lives, in which she reflected on her experiences as a refugee student and as a woman navigating turbulent times.
Dr. Linshan Jiang is an Assistant Professor of East Asian History and Culture at Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri, where she teaches courses that explore gender, memory, and cultural studies in East Asia.
She earned her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a special emphasis in Translation Studies. Her academic journey also includes an M.A. from Tsinghua University and a B.A. (in English) from Beijing Sport University. Prior to her current appointment, she held positions as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Colby College and as a Postdoctoral Associate at Duke University.
Her scholarly interests span modern East Asian history and culture, with particular focus on trauma and memory studies, gender and sexuality, queer studies, and media including podcast studies as well as translation and comparative literature. She is currently developing a book manuscript titled Women Writing War Memories, which examines women writers’ accounts of the Sino‑Japanese and Asia‑Pacific Wars. A second project investigates the performance of queerness in Sinophone queer cultural productions.
Dr. Jiang has published extensively on topics ranging from literature and media culture to scholarly translations between Chinese and English.
