Jing Tsu

Biography

Jing Tsu is Jonathan D. Spence Chair Professor of Comparative Literature & East Asian Languages and Literatures. She specializes in modern Chinese literature & culture and Sinophone studies, from the 19th century to the present. Her research spans literature, intellectual history, science and technology, diaspora and migration studies, and global affairs and international studies. At Yale she offers graduate seminars on sympathy, world Sinophone literature, and approaches to East Asian intellectual and literary history, science and technology. From mainland China to Southeast Asia, Taiwan to Europe, her area of expertise covers the Sinophone world at large. She offers a regular interdisciplinary course, “China in the World,” which features six contemporary topics in historical time. Tsu has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Harvard), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), and the Institute for Advanced Studies (Princeton), and recipient of various fellowships, including the Guggenheim and Mellon New Directions Fellowship. She is a 2023 Pulitzer Finalist for her most recent book, Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern (Riverhead, 2022).

 Education

B.A. UC Berkeley (Comparative Literature)
M.A. UC Berkeley (Rhetoric)
Ph.D. Harvard (Chinese Studies)

Academic Interests

Modern Chinese literature; Sinophone & Diaspora Studies; Linguistics and Philology; History of Science; Technologies of Writing; Theories of Globalization

Publication Highlights

Science and Technology in Modern China, 1880s–1940s (2014) [Amazon]

Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (2011) [Amazon]

Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays (2010) [Amazon]

Failure, Nationalism, and Literature (2005) [Amazon]

Departmental Affiliations

East Asian Languages and Literatures; The MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies; Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Program; Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program.