Dora Zhang

Dora Zhang is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature. Her research encompasses novel studies and novel theory, contemporary multiethnic U.S. fiction, Anglo-European modernism, literature and philosophy, and cultural studies. Her first book, Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel ( "Thinking Literature" series, University of Chicago Press, 2020) turns to some experiments of modernist form - by Henry James, Marcel Proust, and, most centrally, Virginia Woolf - in order to reinvigorate our thinking about the ubiquitous but still under-theorized category of novelistic description. She has also published essays on topics including the role of atmospheres in everyday life, Roland Barthes's travels in China, and the role of the detail in fictions that withhold some piece of social information, such as a character's gender or race. Her editorial work includes a co-edited cluster on "setting" for Modernism/modernity Print Plus, and a new annotated edition of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own for the Norton Library, which appeared in 2026. Her current book project, "On Being a Type," examines what it means to consider individuals – real and fictional – as representative of larger classes of persons.