Jing Tsu is the Jonathan D. Spence Professor of Comparative Literature & East Asian Languages and Literatures. She specializes in modern Chinese literature and 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 at Harvard, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton and is the 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).

Courses Taught