Rate My Professor Jin Feng

Jin Feng is the Orville and Mary Patterson Routt Professor of Literature and Professor of Chinese and Japanese at Grinnell College, where she has been a faculty member since 2001, starting as Assistant Professor and advancing to Associate Professor in 2006 and full Professor in 2012. She holds a PhD in Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Michigan (2000), an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1996), and a BA in Chinese from Fudan University (1993). Before joining Grinnell, she served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Chinese at Swarthmore College (2000-2001). At Grinnell, she has chaired the Department of Chinese and Japanese on multiple occasions, including 2003-2004, 2005-2007, 2009-2011, 2013-2015, and 2016-2019, and was Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion from July 2021 to June 2023. She teaches all levels of Chinese language courses as well as topics in Chinese literature and culture, such as “Chinese Women: Past and Present,” “Modern China through Film and Fiction,” and “Chinese Food for Thought.”

Professor Feng's scholarship centers on Chinese literature and culture, encompassing foodways, web romance, family sagas, the new woman in early twentieth-century fiction, and the institutionalization of creative writing programs in China. Her publications include five monographs in English: The Transpacific Flow: Creative Writing Programs in China (Columbia University Press, 2024), Tasting Paradise on Earth: Jiangnan Foodways (University of Washington Press, 2019), Romancing the Internet: Producing and Consuming Chinese Web Romance (Brill, 2013), The Making of a Family Saga: Ginling College (SUNY Press, 2009), and The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction (Purdue University Press, 2004). She has also authored or edited three books in Chinese and published numerous peer-reviewed articles in outlets such as Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Journal of Popular Romance Studies, Global Food History, and Frontiers of Literary Studies in China. Her work explores themes like food nostalgia, gender and power in culinary narratives, and popular literature in the digital age. In January 2026, she was awarded a grant from ASIANetwork and the Mellon Foundation for her digital humanities project “We Are What We Eat (and Serve): Chinese American Restaurants in Iowa and Beyond.” She is currently researching “Grinnell-in-China, China in Grinnell.”