Amy Dooling

A scholar of modern Chinese literature, Amy Dooling has published books on 20th century women’s writing and feminist literary culture. As Associate Dean of Global Initiatives, Dooling works with offices and individuals across campus to coordinate the College’s global education efforts.

In her expanded role, Professor Dooling works with offices and individuals across campus to coordinate the College's global education efforts. She provides leadership and vision for the Walter Commons, overseeing a wide-ranging portfolio. In addition to partnering with senior administrators and directors to advance the goals of full participation, she contributes to the development of the global-local engagement dimensions of the new Connections program, promotes curricular integration of study away, and advances innovations in the College’s world language programs.

She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Columbia University, where she also earned her master's degree and Ph.D. in Chinese literature. 

Beyond EALC, Dooling has been deeply involved in general education revision through her service on the Education Planning Committee (EPC) and the Connections Coordinating Committee. From 2011-16 she also led the International Commons Steering Committee and from 2014-18 co-directed the Initiative in Global Education, a multi-year project funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Dooling is the 2015 recipient of the Helen Brooks Regan Faculty Leadership award, presented annually to a tenured faculty member whose outstanding service in a leadership role exemplifies the College’s commitment to shared governance, democratic process, and campus community development.

Dooling’s scholarly research focuses on the intersections between political activism and cultural expression in modern China. She has written extensively on the subject of radical women writers and early twentieth-century feminism, the topic of her first book Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth Century China (Palgrave, 2005). This monograph and her highly regarded work as a translator, particularly her two anthologies Writing Women in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 1998) and Writing Women in Modern China: The Revolutionary Years (Columbia University Press, 2005) have been praised as “important landmarks in Chinese gender studies.” Her latest research project examines gender, labor migration and politically-engaged art in the contemporary post-socialist PRC.

Professor Dooling has received numerous fellowships and grants to support her research, including a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, a President's Fellowship from Columbia University, and grants from Fulbright, American Council of Learned Societies, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation and, most recently, the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has been invited to speak on her research at the Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C., the Pembroke Center at Brown University, the East-West Center at University of Hawaii, and the Fairbank Center at Harvard. Dooling was featured as a scholarly expert in a documentary film about the late Qing revolutionary martyr Qiu Jin, Autumn Gem (2009).

Dooling's more recent publications include translations of work by two preeminent Chinese playwrights – Cao Yu’s Sunrise (Methuen Drama Anthology of Modern Asian Plays, 2014) and Tian Han’s Guan Hanqing (Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama, 2014), and an essay “September 1929, Woman Writer Magazine Launched in Shanghai: Gender, Commercialism and the Literary Market” A New Literary History of Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2017).

Visit the The Otto and Fran Walter Commons for Global Study and Engagement.

Majoring in East Asian Studies.