Iris Ma

Biography

Iris Ma is an Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs and Assistant Advising Professor in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, where she also holds a concurrent appointment in the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Iris Ma is a literary and cultural historian specializing in late imperial China and the modern Chinese-speaking world. Her research is situated at the intersection of literature and history, engages with questions related to gender, popular religion, and cultural politics, and investigates how the past has shaped and continues to influence the contemporary Chinese-speaking world. Through examining Chinese narrative tradition and, specifically, cultural products of martial arts created in print, on screen, and in cyberspace, she examines and elucidates how ideas, particularly popular perceptions of and responses to socio-political changes, were generated, disseminated, and appropriated through popular writing and viewing.

Her work has been published in top peer-reviewed journals including Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review. Her chapter on the making of Taiwanese martial arts literature recently appeared in the edited volume Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context: Being and Becoming (Routledge, 2019). She is currently working on her first monograph, which examines the metamorphosis of Chinese martial arts literature and culture from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Martial arts novelists and the immensely popular fantasy world they created, she argues, offer important perspectives on the transformation of literary labor and social changes in late imperial and modern China.