Jing Tsu

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Jing Tsu is an assistant professor at Yale University, where she teaches Chinese literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present. Her research interests include nationalism, intellectual history, race, diaspora, language and dialects, science, and popular culture.

At Radcliffe, Tsu will work on her current book project, “Bend the Mother Tongue: Sinophone Literature,” a comparative study of contemporary Chinese-language literature produced in Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, and North America. The project examines the larger historical and cultural process through which unestablished tongues struggle to become the “national language” of literature. Tsu focuses on the problem of standard writing and the dialectal speech in the context of language policies, script reforms, and the conflicting histories of national belonging, colonialism, and linguistic allegiance.

Tsu earned her BA in comparative literature and MA in rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley. She received her PhD from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University in 2001 and was a junior fellow at the Society of Fellows of Harvard University from 2001 to 2004. She is the author of Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity, 1895–1937 (Stanford University Press, 2005) and a coeditor of Globalizing Modern Chinese Literature: Critical Essays (Brill, forthcoming).