Judith Zeitlin's work combines literary history with other disciplines, such as performance, music, visual and material culture, medicine, gender studies, and film. Her book The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature (2007) explores the representation of ghosts across the range of literary genres in the late Ming and early Qing, specifically the fantasy of a female corpse revived through love, the imagination of death through a ghostly poetic voice, the mourning of the historical past by the present, and the theatricality of the split between body and soul.

In recent years, Zeitlin's research and teaching have become increasingly oriented toward the performing and visual arts as way of engaging actively with all the senses, and not just texts, although close reading of texts remains a fundamental part of Zeitlin's scholarship and pedagogy. Zeitlin co-curated an exhibition with a catalogue called Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture at UChicago’s Smart Museum of Art in 2014.

To learn more, please visit Zeitlin's faculty page.