Sophie Volpp

Professor, Chinese Program and Comparative Literature

University of California - Berkeley

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Sophie Volpp is a professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at University of California - Berkeley, where she is the Chair of the Center for Chinese Studies. A specialist in Chinese literature of the 16th through 19th centuries, Sophie is the author of Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth-Century China (Harvard, 2011) and The Substance of Fiction: Literary Objects in China, 1550-1775 (Columbia, 2022). She has also translated the work of pre-modern women poets and dramatists. Sophie is currently at work on a book about the efforts of the National Peiping Library (now the National Library of China) to preserve their rare book collection during the Sino-Japanese war.

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Sophie was a member of the Board of the Inter-University Program in Beijing and was the founding director of the Huang program at U.C. Berkeley. From 2017-2020 she chaired the department of Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley. She has lived in Beijing and Taipei and has relatives in both cities. She holds A.B., A.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University.