Keith Vincent teaches at Boston University, where he offers courses on Japanese literature. He is proud to have kicked off WLL’s Big Fat Books project with a symposium on the Tale of Genji in 2016. He teaches the Genji every year. These days he is slowly making his way with a group of friends through Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in Scott Moncrieff’s translation while finishing a book on Masaoka Shiki.
Haun Saussy is University Professor at the University of Chicago, teaching in the department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations and in the Committee on Social Thought. His work attempts to bring the lessons of classical and modern rhetoric to bear on several periods, languages, disciplines and cultures. Among his books are The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (1994), Great Walls of Discourse (2001), The Ethnography of Rhythm (2016), Translation as Citation: Zhuangzi Inside Out (2017), Are We Comparing Yet? (2019), The Making of Barbarians: Chinese Literature in Multilingual Asia (2022) and the edited collections Sinographies (2007), Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (2008), and Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader (2010). As translator, he has produced versions of works by Jean Métellus (When the Pipirite Sings, 2019) and Tino Caspanello (Bounds, 2020), among others. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Sophie Volpp is Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley. A specialist in Chinese literature of the 16th through 19th centuries, Sophie is the author of Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth-Century China (Harvard, 2011) and The Substance of Fiction: Literary Objects in China, 1550-1775 (Columbia, 2022). She has also translated the work of pre-modern women poets and dramatists. Her research has received support from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, and the UC Presidents’ Fellowship in the Humanities as well as the LMU-Berkeley fellowship.
Ling Hon Lam is associate professor in Chinese literature at UC Berkeley. He is the author of The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China: From Dreamscapes to Theatricality, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022). He has published a series of essays on Dream of the Red Chamber and the issues of media, including “Stone’s New Clothes: ‘Red Chamber’ Films at Recent Present, 1920s and 50s” (Nanyang Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture). His new project is concerned about media forms, energy, and information in early modern China.
Sunil Sharma teaches and writes on premodern Persian and South Asian literatures. His research interests include poetry and court cultures, history of the book, and travel writing.
Roberta Micallef is Professor of the Practice in World Languages and Literatures in the Department of World Languages and Literatures. She teaches courses on modern Middle Eastern Literature, Modern Middle Eastern Film, Turkic Literatures, and Travel Literature. Micallef’s scholarly works reflect her interest in foreign language pedagogy as well as literary studies. She has received funding for and led national projects on Turkish proficiency guidelines, Curricular Framework for Turkish. Micallef’s literary scholarship is focused on women’s narratives and an investigation of the “female gaze.” Her research resulted in publications about Turkish women and their agency whether as political prisoners or travelers. Micallef is also engaged in literary translation. Micallef is the co-editor of On the Wonders of Land and Sea Persianate Travel Writing (2013) and editor of Illusion and Disillusionment Travel Writing in the Modern Age (2018). She has contributed to a number of scholarly journals and edited anthologies.
Dennis Wuerthner is serving as Assistant Professor of East Asian Literature at the Department of World Languages & Literatures of Boston University. His main field of research is premodern and contemporary Korean literature, history and culture in a broader East Asian context. His most recent contribution in the field of premodern Korean literature is Tales of the Strange by a Korean Confucian Monk (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2020), an in-depth study and fully annotated translation of Kǔmo sinhwa (New Tales of the Golden Turtle) by Kim Sisǔp (1435-1493).
Catherine V. Yeh is Professor of Chinese Literature and Transcultural Studies at Boston University. Her research interest is in global cultural interaction and flow in the fields of literature, media, and visual culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her most recent books and projects include The Chinese Political Novel: Migration of a World Genre (Harvard University Press, 2015) and Asia at the World’s Fairs: An Online Exhibition of Cultural Exchange (Project editor and co-author, Boston University 2018). Her current book project is Improbable Stars: Female Impersonators, Peking Opera and the Birth of Modern Star Culture in 1910s China.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow has worked as a cram school English teacher, literary translator, book designer, fudge and candy maker, conference interpreter, short order cook, magazine photographer, film subtitler, and lowly PA on set for Warner Brothers and Beijing Film Studios. Currently, Eileen is Associate Professor of the Practice in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and Director of Graduate Studies of the Asian/Pacific Research Institute at Duke University. Additionally at Duke, Eileen is a founding/core faculty member in the Asian American Diaspora Studies Program, the first such program in the U.S. South; and is the founding director of Duke Story Lab, a humanities lab dedicated to the study of stories and the communities that coalesce around them. Elsewhere, she directs the Shewo Institute of Chinese Journalism at Shih Hsin University in Taipei, Taiwan, and serves on the editorial boards of Biographical Literature, the LA Review of Books, Asia Society’s China Book Review; and with Carlos Rojas, is co-editor of the Sinotheory book series at Duke University Press. Eileen’s teaching and research interests include literature, film and visual studies, popular culture (anime/manga, fandoms, media technologies), diaspora studies, and the history and cultures of Chinatowns around the world.
More academic details at https://scholars.duke.edu/person/eileen.chow; or find her @chowleen on Twitter.
Takeo Rivera (he/him) is assistant professor of English at Boston University (with affiliations in WGS, AFAMBDS, and AMNESP). He is the author of Model Minority Masochism: Performing the Cultural Politics of Asian American Masculinity (Oxford UP, 2022), as well as a playwright whose work has been staged in New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, and Los Angeles.