Elvin Meng is a joint PhD student in Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Before coming to the University of Chicago, he received his degrees in English and Mathematics from the Johns Hopkins University.
With training in comparative literature and area studies, Elvin Meng is a scholar of the intellectual and media history of “language” in early modern Northeast Asia. His dissertation project, bringing together literary studies, critical theory, Ruist and Buddhist thought, print and manuscript culture, and the history of linguistics, interrogates the shifting meaning of “language learning” and “translation” across the Ming-Qing transition and within the multilingual Qing empire.
He has published peer-reviewed articles on Joyce, Nabokov, digital media, Chinese grammatology, language education, and the history of reading. He is also a student (and sometimes translator) of Indigenous literature from Northeast Asia, with a particular focus on the “Mergen” shamanic-heroic narratives of Tungusic peoples.
In addition to his research, Meng has worked in university collections and the antiquarian book trade as a specialist in premodern East Asian printed books and manuscripts. He has catalogued hundreds of rare items across a wide range of languages and scripts from China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Tibet, and Vietnam. Since 2023, he has served as an elected board member of the Manchu Studies Group, and he is the recipient of the 2026 Nancy Norton Tomasko Fellowship in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography.
Teaching Experience
Instructor of Record (University of Chicago):
EALC 19850 (CMLT 29850/39850) Shamanic Literature
Teaching Assistant (University of Chicago):
EALC 29980/39980 Books in Japan from the Earliest Times to the 1890s
EALC 27512/37512 Dream of the Red Chamber: Forgetting About the Author
EALC 21855/31855 Exile and Chinese Poetry
Teaching Assistant (Johns Hopkins):
AS.110.212 Honors Linear Algebra
AS.110.202 Calculus III
AS.110.109 Calculus II
Selected Publications
Review of The Manchu Language at Court and in the Bureaucracy under the Qianlong Emperor by Mårten Söderblom Saarela. Journal of the American Society for Premodern Asia 146, no. 3 (2026).
Review of Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age by Uluğ Kuzuoğlu. Pacific Affairs: An International Review of Asia and the Pacific 98, no. 2 (2025): 356–358.
“Three Manchu Manuscripts in the East Asian Collection of the University of Chicago Library.” East Asian Publishing and Society 15, no. 2 (2025): 193–212.
“Ioi Cung’s Manchu Lessons, 1913–1919.” Research note. Saksaha: A Journal of Manchu Studies 20 (2024): 43–63.
“4’’ x 6’’ Time Machines: Nabokovian Mnemotechnics and Interwar Psychical Research.” Modernism/modernity32, no. 2 (April 2024): 213–233.
“Zheng Qiao’s Grammatology.” In Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century. Proceedings, edited by Yannis Haralambous, 689–737. Grapholinguistics and Its Applications, Vol. 10. Brest: Fluxus Éditions, 2024.
“Viral Text: Translation, Censorship, Community.” In Digital China: Creativity and Community in the Sinocybersphere, edited by Jessica Imbach, 249–268. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024.
“Reintroducing the Sirens’ Fugue.” James Joyce Quarterly 60, no. 4 (Summer 2023): 527–548.