Zhange Ni

Zhange Ni (Ph.D., University of Chicago Divinity School) studies the intersection of religion, popular culture, and the digital economy, especially how non-Western cosmologies and subjectivities provide not only resources for cultural production but also a critical apparatus for wrestling with advances in digital technology and transformations in political economy. Her first book, The Pagan Writes Back: When World Religion Meets World Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2015), examines literary texts produced in North America and East Asia to propose "pagan criticism," a new reading strategy that attends to the historical complexities and contingencies of literary texts and challenges the aesthetic model of textual analysis premised on Christian and secular assumptions. Her second book, Religion and the Arts in The Hunger Games (Brill, 2020), calls our attention to re-enchantment in the putatively secularized world. She is currently completing her third book, tentatively titled Cultivation Society: Chinese Internet Literature and Fictionality under Digital Capitalism. She has published more than 30 journal articles and book chapters in both English and Chinese.