Huijun Mai (Ph.D.) is Assistant Professor in medieval Chinese literature and culture at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has written and published on medieval Chinese catalogs, the culture of things, and anthropomorphism, court poetry and religious landscape, and most recently, the fascination with horticultural technology and how it challenges the ethics of time. She's currently completing her first monograph, entitled Poets in the Kitchen, in which she examines the entanglement of culinary history, gustatory experience, and poetic culture in eleventh through thirteenth century China.