The editorial committee of Transnational Asia lost its dear friend, Dr. Nanxiu Qian, Professor of Chinese Literature at Rice University, in 2022. To commemorate her life and work, the committee has published a special issue of Transnational Asia titled "Feminism, Transnationalism, Art and Literature: A Tribute to Professor Nanxiu Qian (1947-2022)."
Professor Qian was best known for her pioneering and much-cited work on the enormously influential fifth-century Chinese masterpiece Shishuo xinyu (A New Account of Tales of the World), but she also wrote extensively on a great many other Chinese literary works spanning some two thousand years, from the Lienü zhuan (Biographies of Exemplary Women; first century BCE), to twentieth-century fiction in Taiwan, and gender studies in contemporary American scholarship on China. Her last single-authored book was Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China: Xue Shaohui and the Era of Reform (Stanford University Press, 2015), a highly regarded political and literary biography of a remarkable woman scholar in late nineteenth and early twentieth century China. Nanxiu was also a dedicated, prize-winning teacher who introduced hundreds of students to the beauty and power of texts written by Chinese women, past and present.
Nanxiu will be sorely missed and long remembered. We are pleased that the articles in this commemorative volume will be a part of that remembrance.