Shu-mei Shih

Shu-mei Shih, Professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies, is the Irving and Jean Stone Chair Professor in Humanities. She was the inaugural holder of the Edward W. Said Professorship in Comparative Literature (2019-2022) and the past President of the American Comparative Literature Association (2021-2022).

Among other works, her book, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (2007), has been attributed as having inaugurated the new field of Sinophone Studies. Its Mandarin Chinese translation has gone into four printings (2013; 2015; 2018; 2024) and its Korean translation came out in 2021.  Her second monograph in the field is entitled  Against Diaspora: Discourse on Sinophone Studies 反離散：華語語系研究論 (2017; second printing, 2018), which was translated into Korean in 2024.  She also co-edited two readers for the field,  Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (2013) as well as Sinophone Studies Across Disciplines (2024).

Besides Sinophone studies, her areas of research include comparative modernism, as in the monograph The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937 (2001; Mandarin translation 2007); theories of transnationalism, as in her co-edited Minor Transnationalism (2005; second printing, 2009); critical race studies, as in her guest-edited special issue of PMLA entitled “Comparative Racialization” (2008); critical theory, as in her co-edited Creolization of Theory (2011; second printing, 2014) and her essay collection, Theorizing across Borders跨界理論 (2024); Taiwan studies, as in her guest-edited special issue of Postcolonial Studies entitled “Globalization and Taiwan’s (In)significance” (2003), the co-edited volumes Comparatizing Taiwan (2015; paperback, 2018) and Knowledge Taiwan: On the Possibility of Theory in Taiwan 知識台灣：台灣理論的可能性 (2016), Keywords of Taiwan Theory台灣理論關鍵詞 (March, 2019; second printing May 2019), Indigenous Knowledge in Taiwan and Beyond (2021), and Keywords of Taiwan Theory II 台灣理論關鍵詞II (2025).

She has been a visiting professor at numerous universities in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, including University of Stockholm, University of Sydney, Carlton University, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, University of Amsterdam, National Taiwan Normal University, National Taiwan University, and University of Bologna. She has also given a large number of keynote, endowed, and plenary lectures around the world, and is a recipient of research fellowships from Fulbright-Hays Foundation, American Philosophical Society, and American Council of Learned Societies. Her work has been translated into French, Japanese, Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, and Korean. She also serves on dozens of editorial boards in Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

At UCLA, one of her contributions includes co-directing the “Cultures in Transnational Perspective” Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities with Françoise Lionnet for a decade, which was supported by a grant of $3.2 million from the Mellon Foundation.

She is currently working on two monographs entitled Sinophone Divergences: Empire, Race, Theory and Comparative Literature in a Relational World.