Teaching Professor
2002, D.Phil., Oxford University
1998, M.Phil., Oxford University
1992, B.A., Yale University
Bio
David A. Ross was educated at Yale (B.A. 1992) and Oxford (M.Phil. 1996, D.Phil. 2002). He has been a member of the Department of English & Comparative Literature at UNC since 2002.
His interests include romanticism, modernism, science fiction, utopian literature, world film, and Chinese painting.
David’s first book, A Critical Companion to William Butler Yeats (2009), is a 652-page encyclopedia of the poet’s life and work. It includes interpretive essays on Yeats’ poems, plays, and prose, as well as involved accounts of Yeats’ activities and connections. Post-Yeats, David has co-translated and co-edited the Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s 446-page descriptive catalogue The Search for the Avant-Garde: 1946–1969 (2012).
David has written frequently on twentieth-century Chinese art and Asian cinema, and he collects Chinese paintings and Japanese woodblock prints with his wife Li-ling Hsiao, associate professor of Chinese art and literature in the Department of Asian Studies.
He has served as co-editor (2010–2013) and book review editor (2013–present) of the Southeast Review of Asian Studies (2010–2013), a peer-reviewed journal affiliated with the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies.
He has also served as vice-president (2014) and president (2015) of the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies.
His present research projects include a translation of Xu Wei’s canonical drama anthology Four Cries of the Gibbon (1614) and a study of the Chinese modernist painter Lin Fengmian (1990–1991).
Publications:
Books:
- A Critical Companion to William Butler Yeats (Chelsea House/Facts on File, 2009).
- The Search for the Avant-Garde, 1946–1969 (Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2011), co-editor and co-translator with Li-ling Hsiao.
Recent articles:
- “Lin Fengmian’s Descent into the Dark: His Late Paintings of Crucifixion and Apocalypse” (Southeast Review of Asian Studies, 2017 , pp. 143–157).
- “Alarms of Struggle & Flight: Lin Fengmian’s Hastening Birds and Western Modernity” (Southeast Review of Asian Studies, 2015, pp. 33–49).
- “What Rough Beast? Denunciation and Annunciation in Jo Sung-Hee’s End of Animal” (Southeast Review of Asian Studies, 2015, pp. 73–78).
- “Professor Michael Sullivan and His Paintings” (Southeast Review of Asian Studies, 2014, pp. 146–153).
- “Upholding the Human: Koreeda at Mid-Career” (The Kyoto Journal, March 2013, pp. 169–176).
Courses Taught:
- (ENG 105) Composition & Rhetoric
- (ENG 121) British Literature, 19th & 20th Centuries
- (ENG 123) Introduction to Fiction
- (ENG 124) Contemporary Literature
- (ENG 143) Film & Culture
- (ENG 146) Science Fiction & Utopian Literature
- (ENG 288) Literary Modernism
- (COMP LIT 230) Global Crusoe: The Desert Island Idea in Film & Fiction
- (COMP LIT 257) The Crisis of Modernity in World Cinema