中文
Assistant Professor
Department of English

Office: Walker 518
richardjeanso@uchicago.edu

My research and teaching focus on American literature in an international context. I take the Pacific world, which draws American, Asian American, and East Asian cultures into its fold, as my primary area of specialization. I am interested in how people, ideas and texts have circulated across the Pacific; in how American and East Asian literary systems have interacted historically, whether through modes of collision or confluence; and, in how such moments of encounter have fomented new political and aesthetic forms, new visions of the world.

I am currently completing a book manuscript, Coolie Democracy: U.S.-China Cultural Formation, 1925-55. This project takes as its focus a remarkable cohort of American and Chinese writers – including Pearl Buck, Langston Hughes and Lao She – who, through collaboration and community, sought to integrate American and Chinese cultural systems under the sign of “coolie democracy” – a reinvented, transnational conception of U.S. democracy before the Cold War. My book tracks the rise and fall of this group as they migrated from Shanghai to New York and back and recovers their literary practices: their attempts to mediate vastly different cultures.

My research combines multilingual textual criticism with historical method. I work in English, Chinese and Japanese languages, having completed language programs at National Taiwan University, Tsinghua University, UC-Berkeley, and Middlebury. In research, my work has been supported by Fulbright and Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowships, which took me to archives in New York, Beijing, Boston, Shanghai, San Francisco, and Taipei. I’ve also received Whiting Foundation and Bolin (Williams College) dissertation fellowships.

I earned my BA in Literatures in English at Brown University and my PhD in Comparative Literature (modern American and Chinese literatures) at Columbia University. I am presently an assistant editor at the journal boundary 2.

Courses

Graduate: America’s Asia; Transnational American Literature

Undergraduate: Introduction to Asian American Literature; American Novel Between the Wars, 1919-1945; Reading Cultures

Publications

• "Fictions of Natural Democracy: Pearl Buck, The Good Earth, Asian America." Representations 110, no. 2 (Fall 2010).
• "Collaboration and Translation: Lin Yutang and the Archive of Asian American Fiction." Modern Fiction Studies, 56, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 40-62.
• "Chinese Exclusion Fiction and Global Histories of Race: HT Tsiang and Theodore Dreiser." Genre: Forms of Discourse 39, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 1-25.
• ---- Republished in Realism’s Others (forthcoming from Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010)
• "Gu Cheng." Contribution to special Editor's Column on New York's "Library Walk" exhibit. PMLA 125, no. 6 (December 2010): 4-5.

Education

Ph.D., Columbia University, 2009. Teaching at Chicago since 2010.