Bixuan Zhang

Bixuan Zhang is a first-year Ph.D. student in East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on premodern Japanese literature, with particular interests in Sinitic poetry, Buddhist literature, and the transmission of texts and ideas across East Asia. She studies how Literary Sinitic texts circulated across East Asia and how writers in Japan adapted shared literary traditions to local historical and political contexts. Drawing on the framework of the Sinographic sphere, her work explores the relationship between literature, religion, and identity in premodern East Asia.