Ariel Fox

My work explores the intersection of literary and economic imaginaries in late imperial China. I am particularly interested in the ways in which dramatic forms provided the conceptual grounding for late imperial writers and audiences to negotiate a newly global economy. My first book, The Cornucopian Stage: Performing Commerce in Early Modern China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2023), examines the ways in which seventeenth-century playwrights recuperated commercial subjects and objects—like the merchant and his money—as narratively, morally, and socially productive.

Other current projects include tales of anthropomorphic money, the poetics and aesthetics of banknotes, and movement and gesture on the late imperial stage.