Jonathan Stalling


Jonathan Stalling is an American poet, scholar, editor, translator, professor, and inventor who works at the intersection of English and Chinese. He is the Harold J & Ruth Newman Chair for US-China Issues and Co-Director of the Institute for US-China Issues, and is Professor of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He is also the affiliate English professor at the University of Oklahoma where he serves as the founding curator of the Chinese Literature Translation Archive, and as a founding editor of Chinese Literature Today journal and as the editor of the CLT book series published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

Early life and education

The son of artists, Stalling grew up in Eureka Springs, Arkansas during the back-to-the-land movement, and went to Clear Spring School, where he would later return and teach. After graduating from Eureka Springs High School, he went on to study Chinese at the University of Hawaii and Beijing University, after which he graduated summa cum laude from UC Berkeley with a degree in Chinese studies in 1998. He received his first master's degree from the University of Edinburgh in 2000 and his second from SUNY Buffalo, where he held the McNulty Fellowship in Ethnopoetics and later received his PhD in poetics in 2005.

Career

Stalling became an assistant professor of English Literature at the University of Oklahoma in 2006 where he went on to establish the Chinese Literature Today journal, book series, and the Chinese Literature Translation Archive and Special Collections at Bizzel Memorial Library. Stalling was the first non-Chinese Poet in Residence of Beijing University and Poet in Residence of Hongcun in 2015.

Teaching

Stalling teaches a variety of undergraduate courses on twentieth-century American poetry, east-west poetics, buddhism and beat literature, and creative writing. His graduate seminars have focused on postmodern poetics, transpacific literature and criticism, and literary and cultural theory. In addition to OU courses, Stalling organizes a statewide poetry project that teaches classical Chinese poetic forms in English to K-14 students in Oklahoma Newman Young Writers Award. Stalling has taught courses on Second Language Acquisition and is the creator of new methods for teaching English pronunciation in Chinese language environments.

Poetry

Stalling is the author of three book-length collections of poetry: Grotto Heaven, Yingelishi: Sinophonic Poetry and Poetics, and Lost Wax: Translation through the Void. His opera Yingelishi was performed at Yunnan University in 2010, and a new version of the work is currently in production in collaboration with the composer Yan Yiguo.

Curation

The Chinese Literature Translation Archive houses over 14,000 volumes from the Arthur Waley and Howard Goldblatt personal libraries with over 10,000 archival materials from Waley, Goldblatt, as well as German Sinologist Wolfgang Kubin, Poet-translator Wai-lim Yip among others. Stalling is the founding Director of Mark Allen Everett Poetry Reading Series at and the US-China Poetry Dialog held each year at the University of Oklahoma and Beijing University. Stalling was also the curator of the Poetics of Invention, an exhibition that explores the relationship of English and Chinese phonology through a reimagining of English in China over a 1000-year period.

Editing

Stalling is a founding Editor of Chinese Literature Today magazine and CLT book series and is a co-editor of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, By The River: Contemporary Chinese Novellas, and Contemporary Taiwanese Women Writers: An Anthology.

Research and scholarship

Stalling is the author of the monograph Poetics of Emptiness: Transformations of Asian Thought in American Poetry and has published various articles and book chapters on topics ranging from transpacific poetry, translation studies, and interlanguage art and poetics. More recently Stalling has begun to focus more on Second Language Acquisition theory and applied linguistics and has a forthcoming book introducing his methodology known as Pinying.

Translation

Stalling is the translator of Winter Sun: Poety of Shi Zhi which was a finalist for the National Translation Award and has published multiple translations of the poet Zheng Xiaoqiong.

Invention

Stalling is the inventor of the Stalling Chinese Character Phonetic Transcription System which is available as an iPhone app called Pinying, which won the Outstanding Inventor Award from the Ronnie K Irani Center for the Creation of Economic Wealth in 2016. Stalling also created the English Jueju form of poetry and oversees the English Jueju prize held in conjunction with the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature. Stalling has given two TEDx Talks on interlanguage invention and his work was featured in an exhibition entitled “Poetics of Invention” at the University of Oklahoma Bizzell Memorial Library from 2017-2018 and at the University of Missouri Kansas City Library from 2018-2019.