Jinyi Chu is a scholar of Russian and Chinese literature and culture of the 19th and 20th century. Focusing on the interplay between geopolitics and transnational aesthetics, his research and teaching interests span Russian modernist poetry and prose, socialist culture, Russo-Chinese relations, science fiction, memory and memoirs, and translation studies.
Chu's first book, The Other is The Universal: Fin-de-siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics (Oxford UP, 2024), shows that modernism in Russia emerged not merely under Western influence, but also from a sustained dialogue with Chinese culture. Drawing upon the Sino-Russian case, the book argues that modernist engagement with foreign culture is a search for a higher universal in the age of heightened global interconnectedness. He has also authored numerous peer-reviewed articles and public essays in both English and Chinese on the writing of Vladimir Lenin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Nabokov, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, as well as science fiction writings in Russia and China.
Chu earned his BA in Russian and English and an MA in Russian literature from Shanghai International Studies University and holds a PhD in Slavic languages and literatures from Stanford.