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Shu-mei Shih is a scholar of comparative literature with expertise and interest in Chinese, Sinophone, Asian American, and world literature. Her research focus also includes transnational feminism, comparative 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 and has been translated into Chinese (2007). Her second 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 Sinitic languages outside China, as well as ethnic minorities speaking and writing in the language of the dominant inside China, in both cases situated on the margins of China and Chineseness.
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 various scholarly journals in the U.S., and writes regularly for journals and anthologies in Taiwan and China. Her current projects include two editing projects, one for PMLA (Publication of Modern Language Association) on the topic of "Comparative Racialization" (October 2008) and the other a co-edited collection of essays entitled Creolization of Theory. Otherwise, she is either busy trying to invent a new term for a new monograph, called Trialectics with which she hopes to move cross-cultural and transnational studies beyond dialectical models, or exploring the conditions of possibility for the postsocialist human in contemporary China. She is also wondering whether she should be writing a Manifesto of Sinophone Studies, as she feels very passionate about the Sinophone as a historical and theoretical category, alongside such language-based studies as the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone.
Having co-directed the University of California Multicampus Research Group on Transnational and Transcolonial Studies for seven years (1999-2006), she currently co-directs UCLA's Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in the Humanities with her collaborator Françoise Lionnet. The Mellon project examines minor and minority cultures from comparative perspectives and its project title is "Cultures in Transnational Perspective." More information can be found at: http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/mellon.
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