Folklore: Material Culture, Heritage, Museums, Tourism, Oral Narrative, Ethnographic Fieldwork, China, East Asia
Lijun Zhang (Ph.D., Indiana University-Bloomington) is Assistant Professor of Folklore in George Mason University’s English Department. Her research interests include material culture, heritage (tangible and intangible), museums and curatorship, institutionalization, tourism, oral narrative, and folklore of China and East Asia. She is co-editor of Chinese Folklore Studies Today: Discourse and Practice and Quilts of Southwest China. She co-curated “Putting Baskets to Use in Southwest China” and the international traveling exhibition “Quilts of Southwest China”. She serves as associate editor of the Journal of American Folklore and on the editorial board of Museum Anthropology Review. She collaborates with a team of international scholars to conduct ethnographic research regarding material culture in southwest China. She is also working on a monograph on ethnographic research on tulou (rammed earth building) World Heritage site in southeast China. She teaches courses in folklore and folklife, material culture, museums, Chinese folk culture, and oral narrative.
Books
Zhang, Lijun and Ziying You, editors. 2019. Chinese Folklore Studies Today: Discourse and Practice. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. [in English] link
MacDowell, Marsha and Lijun Zhang, editors. 2016. Quilts of Southwest China. Nanning: Guangxi People’s Press and distributed by Indiana University Press. [in English and Chinese] link
Articles and Book Chapters
Zhang, Lijun, Jason Baird Jackson, C. Kurt Dewhurst, and Jon Kay. Forthcoming. “Basketry Among Two Peoples of Northern Guangxi, China.” Asian Ethnology. [in English]
Zhang, Lijun. 2021. “The Practice of Public Folklore in the United States in the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic [Xinguan feiyan yiqing xia de meiguo gonggong minusxue shijian].” Folk Culture Forum [Minjian wenhua luntan], (2): 5-15. [in Chinese]
Jackson, Jason Baird, Johannes Müske, and Lijun Zhang. 2020. "Innovation, Habitus, and Heritage: Modeling the Careers of Cultural Forms Through Time." Journal of Folklore Research 57, no. 1: 111-36. [in English]
Zhang, Lijun. 2019. “Institutional Practice of Heritage-making: The Transformation of Tulou from Residential Home to UNESCO World Heritage Site” in Chinese Folklore Studies Today: Discourse and Practice. Lijun Zhang and Ziying You, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.[in English]
Zhang, Lijun and Ziying You. 2019. “Introduction: History and Trends of Chinese Folklore Studies” in Chinese Folklore Studies Today: Discourse and Practice. Lijun Zhang and Ziying You, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. [in English]
Zhang, Lijun. 2018. “Presentation, Representation, and Museumification in Heritage Tourism: The Case of Hongkeng Hakka Earth Building Folk Cultural Village.” Museum Anthropology Review. 12 (1): 5-13. [in English]
Zhang, Lijun. 2016. “Performing Locality and Identity: Rickshaw Driver’s Narratives and Tourism.” Cambridge Journal of China Studies. 11 (1): 88-103. [in English]
ENGH 315 Folklore and Folklife
ENGH 412/590 Folk Narratives: Past & Present
ENGH 412/591 Material Culture and Museums
FOLK 570 ENGH 412/591 Folklore in China
2021 “ICH and Community Crafting Practice: The Case of Commercial Basketry in Eastern Guizhou.” Material Culture and Heritage Safeguarding Symposium Organized for the International Folklore Studies Center, Beijing Normal University and Indiana University. (Online)
2021. "Quilts of Southwest China." Textile Talks. (with Marsha MacDowell) (Online)
2020. “The Peoples of Southwest China and Their Traditional Arts.” San Antonio Museum of Art. San Antonio, Texas, USA.(with Jason Baird Jackson) (Online)
2020. “Meta-cultural Awareness and Museumification: The Idealized Representation of Tulou Living Space in Heritage Tourism.” Institute of Folk Literature, School of Chinese Language and Literature, Beijing Normal University. Beijing, China. (Online)
2019. "Baskets in a Baiku Yao Community Today." Annual Conference of the American Anthropology Association. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
2019. "The Semantics of Safeguarding in the Context of UNESCO and China." Critical Developments in Cultural Sustainability Working Conference. The Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Washington D.C., USA.
2019. “Institutional Practice of Heritage Making: The Transformation of Tulou From Residential Home to UNESCO World Heritage.” Annual Conference of the American Folklore Society. Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
2019. “Building a Museum Collection of Work Baskets in Northern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.” Annual Conference of the American Folklore Society. Baltimore, Maryland, USA. (with Jason Baird Jackson)
2019. “Collaboration with Community Individuals and Ecomuseums in Ethnographic Research.” The Seventh Forum on China-US Folklore and Intangible Cultural Heritage: Collaborative Work in Museum folklore and Heritage Studies. Indiana University Beijing Gateway, Beijing, China.
2018. “Continuity and Transformation: Basketry, Personal History, and Community Life.” Annual Conference of the American Folklore Society. Buffalo, New York, USA.
2017. “The Quilts of Southwest China Catalog: A Binational and Bilingual Collaborative Museum Publication Project.” Annual Conference of the American Folklore Society. Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.