Shu-mei Shih is a professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, with a fractional appoint as the Hon-yin and Suet-fong Chan Professor of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong and an honorary chair professorship at National Taiwan Normal University. Among other works, her book, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (2007), has been attributed as having inaugurated a new field of study called Sinophone Studies. Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (2013) is a textbook that she co-edited for the field. Her latest work in this field is Against Diaspora: Discourse on the Sinophone, a Sinophone monograph published in Taiwan (2017). Besides Sinophone studies, her areas of research include comparative modernism, as in the book The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937 (2001); theories of transnationalism, as in her co-edited Minor Transnationalism (2005); 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); Taiwan studies, as in her guest-edited special issue of Postcolonial Studies entitled “Globalization and Taiwan’s (In)significance,” the co-edited volumes Comparatizing Taiwan (2015) and Knowledge Taiwan: On the Possibility of Theory in Taiwan (2016).
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Chinese and Sinophone literature from all over the world, modernism, transnationalism, feminism, and postsocialism.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Against Diaspora: Discourse on the Sinophone 反離散：華語語系研究論 (Published in Taiwan by Linking Publishing Co., 2017)
Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (Columbia University Press, 2013).
Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (University of California Press, 2007).
The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937 (University of California Press, 2001).