East Asian Languages and Cultures

Keith McMahon

Keith McMahon studies Ming and Qing fiction, male and female character types in Chinese literature, eroticism, opium smoking, modern subjectivity, and literary and psychoanalytic theory.

McMahon received his B.A. in French and Comparative Literature from Indiana University, his M.A. in Chinese from Yale University, and his Ph.D. in Chinese from Princeton University. He studied one year of Chinese in Taiwan, and did Ph.D. and post-doctorate research in Shanghai and Beijing for four years. He has taught at the University of Kansas since 1984, where he has been Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures since 1996. He taught one semester at the University of California at Berkeley in 2002.

Recently he has written on opium smoking in 19th and 20th century China; opium smoking and modern subjectivity; nineteenth-century fiction, including sequels to Dream of the Red Chamber; polygyny and sexuality in China on the verge of modernity; and prostitution in late Qing fiction. He has lectured in Chinese and English on these topics in the United States, China, Taiwan, Italy, Germany, the Czech Republic, and France.