Robert Joe Cutter is a native of Yuma , Arizona . He was born in 1947 and received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Arizona in Oriental Studies (China Specialization). In 1983, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington with a dissertation on the poet Cao Zhi (192-232) done under the direction of Professor David R. Knechtges. From 1983 until 2005, he was a professor of Chinese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was chair of that department for four years and also served as director of UW-Madison's Center for East Asian Studies. Currently he is director of ASU's School of International Letters and Cultures (SILC). His primary field of teaching and research is early medieval Chinese literature and the history of the Three States period, although he has also published more broadly on premodern China and has done work on modern China , as well. Traditional Chinese literature and history, with emphasis on the Han and early medieval periods. His publication includes: The Brush and the Spur: Chinese Culture and the Cockfight (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); and Empresses and Consorts: Selections from Chen Shou's Records of the Three States With Pei Songzhi's Commentary (with other authors; Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999).

Young Kyun Oh graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Ph.D. in Chinese linguistics after his M.A. degree in philosophy at Sogang University, Seoul, Korea. His research interests are in two areas: Sino-Korean comparative historical phonology and the cultural connection between China and Korea. In his on-going research, he works on traces of Old Chinese linguistic strata fossilized in vernacular Korean, a subject on which he did his Ph.D. research and has presented several papers. For his next project on the Sino-Korean cultural connection, Oh looks into how some of the canonical books of China were received in Korea.

Steve West received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. His research interests are the urban culture of early modern China , the literature of gardens in pre-modern China, Song and Yuan literature, and early Chinese performance-based literature; and teaches courses in literary Chinese and the texts and problems of areas of interest. His publications include a translation of the Xixiang ji , the Story of the Western Wing , and in the past five years: “論<才子牡丹亭>之<西廂記>評注" (On the Talented One's Version of the Peony Pavilion 's commentary on the Story of the Western Wing, «湯顯祖與牡丹亭» (Tang Xianzu and the Peony Pavilion) (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 2005), 467–496; “Meng Yuanlao, ‘Recollections of the Northern Song Capital',” in Hawai'i Reader in Traditional Chinese , ed. Victor H. Mair and Paul R. Golden ( Honolulu : Hawaii University Press, 2005) pp. 405–22; “Autumn Sounds: Music to the Ears/ Ouyang Xiu's “ Fu on Autumn's Sounds,” Early Medieval China 10–11.2 (2005), 73–100; “Where Did I Put That? Archiving Documents in the Song,” Journal of American Oriental Society (2006), forthcoming; “Body and Imagination in Song Gardens,” Gardens and Imagination (Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2007); “The Caizi Mudan ting and Jin Shengtan's Commentary on The Story of the Western Wing ,” Chinoperl (2007); “Intertextuality and Desire: Mimesis in The Story of the Western Wing and The Departed Soul of Qiannü ,” Proceedings  of International Conference on Performing Literature in Honor of Yu Ta-kang's 100th Birthyear. Taipei : Center for Performing Arts, forthcoming; “Shifting Spaces: Local Dialect in A Playboy from a Noble House Opts for the Wrong Career ,” Journal of Theater Studies 1.1 (2008), forthcoming. prose and poetry of late medieval China (the Song and Yuan dynasties), urban literature of the 12th-13th century, and early Chinese drama.

Tim Wong received his Ph.D. degree from Stanford University, and been on the ASU faculty from 1974-84, and since 1995. He spent 1984-85 as Resident-Director for a language program for American students at Peking University and then was on the faculty at The Ohio State University for ten years.  He returned to ASU in the summer of 1995 to be Director of the then Center for Asian Studies, a post he held until 2002, when he returned full-time to the then Department of Languages and Literatures to begin a new MA program in Asian Languages and Civilizations. Wong has taught the Chinese language for most of his career, and has published three books and many articles on the tradition of Chinese fiction which, he believes, has continued on to present-day China.  He has also published a good number of literary translations. His publication includes: Wu Ching-tzu (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978) and Stories for Saturday: Twentieth-Century Chinese Popular Fiction (University of Hawai`i Press, 2002).

Xia Zhang received her Ph.D. in linguistics from the Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta, Canada. She started her career in Chinese language instruction in 1995. Since she joined ASU in 2002, she has offered various Chinese language courses as well as graduate courses including Introduction to Chinese language and linguistics and Teaching Chinese as a second language. Dr. Zhang has also been working as a coordinator and supervisor of graduate teaching assistants for first-year Chinese language courses. Her research interests lie in the areas of second language acquisition, Chinese grammatical structures, and Chinese language pedagogy. Her publication includes: “A comparative study of Chinese and English anaphor use in discourse” LACUS Forum XXX: Language, Thought and Reality (2004) 1-10; “Getting Your Meaning Across–Teaching L2 Grammar in Context” (paper presented at the 6th International Conference on Chinese Language Pedagogy, Nanjing, China, 2007); and "Integrating technology in the teaching of Mandarin pronunciation” (paper presented at Southwest Conference on Language Teaching (SWCOLT), Phoenix, 2006).

John Zou received his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley, and teaches modern Chinese literature and cinema at SILC. His research addresses Chinese theater, cinema, and postcolonialism. His publications include: “La Femme Fatale: Mei Lanfang, Public Space, and Folk Opera in Chinese Cinema,” in Zhang Yingjing and Mary Farquhar (ed.): Stars in Chinese Cinema, (forthcoming), “Crossdressed Nation: Mei Lanfang and the Clothing of Modern Chinese Men,” in Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures, Larissa Heinrich and Fran Martin, eds., Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 79-97, 2006, “A Chinese Ghost Story: Ghostly Counsel and Innocent Man,” in Chinese Films in Focus, Chris Berry, ed., London, England: British Film Institute, pp.39-46, 2003, “English Idiom and Republican China: Repatriated Subject in Wong-Quincey’s Chinese Hunter,” in World Englishes, Kinsley Bolton and Q. S. Tong (editors), Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, Vol.21, No.2, pp.291-304, 2002, “Travel and Translation: An Aspect of China’s Cultural Modernity 1862-1926,” in China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature, Yingjin Zhang (editor), Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp.133-151, 1998.