Jing Tsu

Biography

Jing Tsu, a 2016 Guggenheim fellow, specializes in modern Chinese literature & culture and Sinophone studies, from the 19th century to the present. Her research spans literature, linguistics, science and technology, typewriting and digitalization, diaspora studies, migration, nationalism, and theories of globalization. At Yale she offers graduate seminars on sympathy, world Sinophone literature, and approaches to East Asian intellectual and literary history. From mainland China to Southeast Asia, 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).  She is currently writing a new book on what happened to the Chinese script in the age of the western alphabet, to appear with Riverhead at Penguin Random House. 

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.