Jon von Kowallis

Biography

Jon Eugene von Kowallis is Professor of Chinese Studies at UNSW Sydney, where he founded and taught courses on Chinese language and literature, poetics, orientalism, cinema and literary translation. He studied Chinese literature at Columbia (BA), Taiwan University, Hawaii (MA), Peking University and the University of California, Berkeley (PhD). His monographs include “The Lyrical Lu Xun: A Study of his Classical-style Poetry” and “The Subtle Revolution: Poets of the ‘Old Schools’ during Late Qing and Early Republican China“. Forthcoming books include “Ro Jin (Lu Xun): the classic 1944 study by Takeuchi Yoshimi“, “Warriors of the Spirit: ‘On the Power of Mara Poetry’ and Other Early wenyan Essays by Lu Xun” and “Lu Xun: a research biography“. Jon has held an ARC Discovery Project on the formation of Lu Xun’ s early thought during his Japan period (1902-1909) and a current fellowship from the China-US Scholars Program at the Institute of International Studies in Washington (the former Fulbright Research Fellowship) for a project on Taiwan soft-power in mainland China. He is President of the Australian Association for Asian Humanities.