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Research dossier · People & Ideas

Christopher G. Rea

Literary historian (born 1977)

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 20, 2026
Entity authorityQ113662173 ↗
Source-derived summary

Christopher G. Rea (born 1977) is a literary and cultural historian, and Professor of Chinese in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. The author, editor, and translator of several books, he is best known for his study The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China (California, 2015), which won the Association for Asian Studies Joseph Levenson Book Prize (post-1900 China) in 2017. He is also author of Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1949 (Columbia, 2021) and co-author of Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World) (Chicago, 2022).

Education

Rea attended Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California and majored in Chinese language and literature at Dartmouth College, graduating in 1999. He earned an M.A. (2004) and Ph.D. (2008) in Modern Chinese Literature from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures of Columbia University, where his advisor was David Der-wei Wang. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Taipei, Taiwan (2004–2005), where he conducted research at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy of the Academia Sinica. During the final two years of his doctorate, he was a visiting fellow at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Harvard University.

Career

Rea is currently Professor of Chinese in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia, having been hired as an assistant professor in 2008. He has also served as Associate Head of the Department of Asian Studies and as director of the UBC Centre for Chinese Research. In 2012, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Christopher G. Rea” as literary historian (born 1977). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1977, 2015, 1900, 2017—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1977-01-01. The account is most persuasive where Christopher, Literary and historian can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as literary historian (born 1977). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q113662173. VIAF identifies the subject as 121083724. The Library of Congress control number is n2010032576. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1977, 2015, 1900 and 2017.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
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Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Christopher G. Rea”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Christopher G. Rea primary sources, Christopher G. Rea archive and Christopher research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Christopher G. Rea”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Christopher G. Rea” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.