Research
My research interests are modern Chinese literature, word and music studies, digital humanities and queer studies. In 2020, I published my monograph The Condition of Music and Anglophone Influences in the Poetry of Shao Xunmei, which was reviewed favorably by Prof. Nick Admussen in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (September, 2020):
It is well-made, carefully thought through, and easy to read. It will be of interest to anyone who researches Shao Xunmei, and would be quite worthwhile for those who study the aesthetics of Republican Shanghai. Many researchers in Chinese literature would benefit from its advocacy of an internalized, daily practice of feminist criticism. Its influence on teaching feels prospective: this book might usefully inform either a transnational, translingual course on cosmopolitan Shanghai or a survey of early twentieth century poets whose breadth included Chinese writers like Shao. [Full-text review here]
The book also received positive feedback from Prof. Paul Manfredi in Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature (March, 2022):
This is the kind of work that crosscultural influence studies should be, readings that are close to the point of microscopic, revealing affinities and departures that demonstrate what is really involved when writers work to both emulate their influences and establish their own creative voices in a new language and cultural context […] it is certainly a rigorous reading with respect to the ideas he advances about how feminism, poetry, and human experience intersect […] Tian Jin’s book is an excellent study of a single author, and one that draws in larger issues of literary and cultural influence and dispatches them very well. [Full-text review here]
In 2025, I served as the third author of a textbook entitled American Literature: Viewing, Listening, and Speaking. My research enables me to develop teaching programs and provide learning support. I have good written and verbal communication skills, and I can communicate complex and conceptual research ideas to a diverse range of groups.
Works in Progress
-My second book project Interart Modernism in China: Music, Poetry, and Transnational Aesthetics
My research on Shao Xunmei has led me to a broader question: what happens when modern Chinese intellectuals move between literary and musical creation rather than working within a single artistic medium? My current book project, Interart Modernism in China: Music, Poetry, and Transnational Aesthetics, develops this question by examining modern Chinese intellectuals who engaged in both literary and musical creation, including figures such as Qing Zhu 青主 and Zhao Yuanren 赵元任. By studying their works across poetry, composition, and musical practice, the project investigates how these intellectuals negotiated Chinese and transnational modernist aesthetics.
The project argues that music was not simply an accompaniment to modern Chinese literature but an important medium through which modernist ideas were articulated, contested, and experienced. Republican poets and composers encountered Western musical forms, theories, and institutions alongside new literary movements and aesthetic ideas. Their creative practices complicate conventional distinctions between literary and musical modernism. Qing Zhu, for example, provides a particularly productive case for examining the relationship between poetic language and musical composition, while Zhao Yuanren’s work demonstrates the importance of musical composition and language to the cultural formation of modern China. By placing literary and musical practices within the same analytical framework, my project seeks to expand our understanding of Chinese modernism beyond a predominantly text-centered history.
-From Poetic Voice to Artificial Voice: AI and the Afterlife of Qing Zhu’s Art Songs
The emergence of artificial intelligence in music production challenges traditional understandings of the relationships among words, music, and voice. This project explores how AI singing voice synthesis can re-mediate the poetic and musical legacy of Republican Chinese poet/composer Qing Zhu, whose art songs represent a crucial intersection of modern Chinese poetry, Western musical traditions, and transnational aesthetic exchange.
Drawing on theories of intermediality and sound studies, this study examines an experimental reconstruction of Qing Zhu’s art songs through contemporary AI technologies. Beginning with historical musical scores, the project employs optical music recognition, digital notation, MIDI conversion, and AI singing voice synthesis (Synthesizer V Studio 2 Pro) to transform archival musical materials into a newly generated vocal performance. Rather than treating AI as a neutral reproduction tool, this project considers artificial voice as a new form of musical mediation that reshapes the relationships among poetic language, musical notation, and vocal embodiment.
The project asks: when a historical song is performed through an AI-generated voice, does the technology restore a lost vocal tradition, or does it create a new form of sonic afterlife? By examining the distance among the original poetic voice, the imagined historical performer, and the contemporary artificial voice, this study investigates how AI complicates concepts of authorship, authenticity, and musical memory.
Through the case of Qing Zhu, this project argues that AI does not merely reproduce historical sound but produces a new intermedial space in which Republican Chinese musico-poetic modernism can be reinterpreted through contemporary digital aesthetics. The project contributes to discussions of word and music studies by demonstrating how AI-generated voices open new possibilities for understanding the afterlife of musical works across historical, cultural, and technological boundaries.
-The Literary Salons of Republican Shanghai: An Interactive Game Based on Lu Shaofei’s Tearoom Conversations
This project presents The Literary Salons of Republican Shanghai, an interactive narrative game based on Lu Shaofei’s 鲁少飞 Tearoom Conversations (Wentan chahua tu 文坛茶话图), a visual representation of Republican literary figures. The game digitally reconstructs the literary world of Shanghai in 1936, transforming a static image of literary gathering into an interactive space of encounters, conversations, and historical imagination.
Rather than presenting writers as isolated individuals within literary history, the game explores Republican Shanghai as a dynamic cultural ecosystem shaped by authors, publications, urban spaces, social networks, and intellectual tensions. Players enter a fictionalized tearoom gathering as “Reader” and interact with twenty-nine literary figures inspired by the personalities depicted in Lu Shaofei’s work. Through dialogues, choices, and the discovery of hidden relationships, players experience the complex networks behind literary production and cultural exchange.
As a digital humanities project, this work examines how interactive media can offer new approaches to studying and communicating modern Chinese literature. By converting a visual archive of literary community into an experiential narrative environment, the project investigates questions of authorship, memory, canon formation, and the relationship between historical representation and digital storytelling.