The UCLA Asian American Studies Center and Department are pleased to announce that Professor Shu-mei Shih has been promoted to full professor. She has appointments in UCLA's departments of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies, and has been an active member of the Asian American Studies Center's Faculty Advisory Committee for many years. She is also the co-director of UCLA's Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in the Humanities under the title "Cultures in Transnational Perspective," which promotes comparative studies of minority cultures in transnational contexts.
Professor Shih is a scholar of comparative literature with expertise and interest in Chinese, Sinophone, and Asian American literatures. Her research focus also includes transnational feminism, minority discourse, modernism, (post)humanism, and (post)colonialism. Her first book was a comprehensive study of Chinese literary modernism from the early twentieth century that integrated theoretical, historical, and textual approaches. The book, THE LURE OF THE MODERN: WRITING MODERNISM IN SEMICOLONIAL CHINA, 1917-1937 (University of California Press, 2001), also engaged deeply with theories of colonialism and postcolonialism.
Her forthcoming book, VISUALITY AND IDENTITY: SINOPHONE ARTICULATIONS ACROSS THE PACIFIC (University of California Press, 2007), theorizes and substantiates the new category of the Sinophone as the culture and literature of peoples speaking and writing different Chinese languages outside China, especially Taiwan, pre-1997 Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, and Chinese America. She edited a special issue of POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES on the topic of "Globalization and Taiwan's (In)significance"; co-edited (with Françoise Lionnet) MINOR TRANSNATIONALISM (Duke 2005); and also co-edited (with Ying-ying Chien) a special issue of CHUNG-WAI LITERARY MONTHLY on the topic of "Third World and Transnational Feminism." She publishes widely in all the major humanistic scholarly journals in the U.S., writes regularly for journals and anthologies in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, and her work has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, and French.
Her current work includes two editing projects, one for PMLA (Publication of Modern Language Association) entitled COMPARATIVE RACIALIZATION (forthcoming in 2008) and the other a co-edited collection of essays dealing with the question of "theory" entitled CREOLIZATION OF THEORY. Otherwise, she is trying to invent a new term for a new monograph called "Trialectics" with which she hopes to move cross-cultural, comparative, and transnational studies beyond dialectical models.
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