Guanyu Shao

Guanyu Shao graduated from Peking University with a BA in Persian and a minor in Chinese language and literature, and has joined the AM program in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University since 2024. She is interested in studying rewriting, imitation, and translation in Middle Eastern literatures from a comparative literary perspective. Her undergraduate honor thesis focuses on Persian letters translated and exchanged between Shāhrukh Bahādur and Zhu Di from 1409 to 1412, revealing the translation strategies used by the invisible translator. Her previous research topics also covered the interpretation on ʿUmar Khayyām in the early 20th-century Chinese literary revolution, the argument of Persian literature's untranslatability, and Jorge Luis Borges's rewriting of Manṭiq uṭ-Ṭayr. At Harvard, Guanyu hopes to expand her understanding of "adab" as a multilingual tradition. She is also interested in how texts and images can collaborate in making narratives. She primarily uses Persian for her research, and plans to learn Arabic and Ottoman Turkish in graduate studies.