Co-Directors
Selina Lai-Henderson is Associate Professor of American Literature and History at Duke Kunshan University. She is on the editorial board of the American Quarterly (flagship journal of the American Studies Association), and is currently a non-resident Fellow (following her spring 2025 residency) in the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.
Her monograph-in-progress, “You Are No Darker Than I Am”: Writers of Transnational Blackness in Twentieth-Century China (under contract with Princeton University Press), reveals both compelling and conflicting transracial visions inspired by the work of Langston Hughes, Mu Shiying, W.E.B Du Bois, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Toni Morrison. She is the author of Mark Twain in China (Stanford University Press, 2015), and her work has appeared in The Yale Review, MELUS, and Journal of Transnational American Studies, as well as book chapters in Mark Twain in Context (2019) and Langston Hughes in Context (2022), both published by Cambridge University Press. Her essay, “You Are No Darker Than I Am: The Souls of Black Folk in Maoist China” (PMLA, Sep 2023), is the 2023 winner of the 1921 Prize in American Literature (tenured category).
Lai-Henderson has served as Chair and co-Chair (with Perin Gurel at Notre Dame) of American Studies Association’s International Committee (2022-2024). In 2025, she served on the judging panel for the ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies)’s Open Access Book Prize in Literary Studies. She was previously a senior Associate Managing Editor for the Journal of Transnational American Studies, and is on the advisory board of Global Nineteenth Century Studies.
Carlos Rojas is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies; Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies; and Arts of the Moving Image. His research focuses on issues of gender and visuality, corporeality and infection, and nationalism and diaspora studies, particularly as they relate to the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the global Chinese diaspora. He works primarily in the early modern, modern, and contemporary periods. He is the author of three books: The Naked Gaze: Reflection on Chinese Modernity, The Great Wall: A Cultural History, and Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation.
He is the co-editor of five books: Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History (with David Der-wei Wang), Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture: Cannibalizations of the Canon (with Eileen Cheng-yin Chow), The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas (with Eileen Cheng-yin Chow), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures (with Andrea Bachner), and Ghost Protocol: Development and Displacement in Global China (with Ralph Litzinger). He is also the translator of five volumes of literary fiction, including Yu Hua’s Brothers (translated with Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, and shortlisted for the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize), Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses, The Four Books, The Explosion Chronicles, and Marrow (of which The Four Books shortlisted for both the 2016 Man Booker International Prize and the 2016 FT/Oppenheimer Emerging Voices Award), and Malaysian Chinese author Ng Kim Chew’s Slow Boat to China and Other Stories.
