Jing Tsu

Jing Tsu, a Guggenheim Fellow, is a cultural historian of modern China at Yale. An expert on language, literature, history, culture, and science and technology from the 19th century to now, she is John M. Schiff Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures & Comparative Literature, a member of the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, and a senior fellow at the MacMillan Center for International & Area Studies. She has written for The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and Financial Times. She was the cultural commentator for NBC at the 2022 Beijing Olympics. Her authored/edited books include: Failure, Nationalism, and Literature; Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora; Science and Technology in Modern China, 1880s-1940s; Global Chinese Literature. Her most recent non-fiction book, Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern (Riverhead, 2022), has received wide international acclaim in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The New Yorker, The Economist, Wired, Science, Nature, Physics World, The Times, The Spectator, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Scotsman, Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), NRC (The Netherlands), Frankfurter Allgemeine (Germany), etc. The subject of more than 30 podcasts and webinars, Kingdom of Characters was nominated for several international book prizes across multiple categories, including the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, the Cundhill History Prize, and the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. Her book was named a "Notable Books of 2022" by The New York Times and a "Best Non-Fiction of 2022" by The Washington Post.