Yiren Zheng is an interdisciplinary scholar whose areas of research expertise include early modern Chinese literature (especially from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century) and sound studies. 

Her book manuscript, Voice Gone Awry: Theorizing Human Expression in Early Modern China, shows that literary representations of nonlinguistic sounds (including whistling, sonic storytelling, bird vocalizations, and other sounds from the natural world), reflects concerns about the limitations of a human language shared among Ming dynasty literary authors. She is also working on a second project that examines dream-generated writings from the seventeenth century. Her publications include peer-reviewed journal articles, such as "Sounding the Ineffable: Third-Century Chinese Whistling as an Alternative Voice" (positions: asia critique) and "Listening Askance with a Seventeenth-century Chinese Acousmatic Voice" (Parallax), as well as public-facing essays including "Echoing: A Tale of Silence" (The Shanghai Literary Review). 

Dr. Zheng holds a B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature from Sun Yat-sen University (Guangzhou), an M.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago. She was a Society of Fellows postdoctoral researcher at Dartmouth College from 2022 to 2025. Before joining DKU, she taught at the University of Chicago and Dartmouth College, offering a variety of courses on Chinese and Sinophone literature, comparative literature, and gender and sexuality studies.