Professor Hegel is a specialist in Chinese narrative literature of the late imperial period. Before his retirement in 2018, he taught courses on Chinese literature and culture, including the popular Chinese Civilization class, and advanced seminars in late imperial period fiction and theater.
Hegel worked with two Washington U alums, Dr. Shen Jing of Eckerd College, St. Augustine, Florida, and Dr. Li Qiancheng of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, on separate translation projects. The first is a humorous play by Li Yu (1610-1680), Bimu yu 比目魚; it will be published by Columbia University Press early in 2020 as A Couple of Soles. The other is a dense little novel attributed to Dong Tuo (1620-1686) but probably penned by his father, Dong Sizhang (1586-1628), Xiyou bu 西遊補; University of Washington Press will publish Further Adventures on the Journey to the West later that year. He also continues to work on the early history of the novel in China, focusing on developments during the sixteenth century.
