Shuang Shen

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese at Pennsylvania State University

Professor Shen’s fields of specialization include: Modern and contemporary Chinese literature; Sinophone literature of the 20th century; Chinese diaspora literature; Asian American literature; and Postcolonial literature and theory.

Her book, Cosmopolitan Publics: Anglophone Print Culture in Semi-Colonial Shanghai (Rutgers University Press, 2009), focuses on China’s “cosmopolitans,” Western-educated intellectuals who returned to Shanghai in the late 1920s to publish in English and who, ultimately, became both cultural translators and citizens of the wider world.

During her 2019–2020 residency at the National Humanities Center, Professor Shen drafted two chapters of her work in progress, Cold War and Sinophone Literature at the Borders, which examines the lively and politically engaged Sinophone cultural sphere spanning from Hong Kong to Southeast Asia from the 1950s to the 1970s and engages with the key question of how the Chinese diaspora evolved in the context of decolonization movements, Cold War geopolitics, Third World internationalism, and Chinese migration and exile. She revised and edited an article entitled “Border as Method,” which has been published in Prism (Duke University Press, 16:2, 2020). She also completed a Chinese-language article on “Eileen Chang, Dialect Literature, and the Art of Specificity,” for the journal Twenty-First Century. She worked on a coedited special issue on “Infrastructure as Inter-Asia Method,” with Xiao Liu, for the journal Interventions: International Journal in Postcolonial Studies. She also wrote and submitted a proposal for a special issue on “Cold War and World Literature,” coedited with Sorin Cucu, for The Journal of World Literature.