Tina Lu, recently appointed as the Colonel John Trumbull Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures, is a scholar and educator whose research and teaching focus on the literature of China’s late imperial period, from around 1550 to around 1750.
Lu has served as head of Pauli Murray College since its opening in 2017, acting as its chief administrative officer and the presiding faculty presence.
Lu’s major publications include “Persons, Roles and Minds” and “Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature”; a book-length chapter on late Ming literary culture in “The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature,” Volume Two; and a co-edited book on “Approaches to Teaching ‘The Story of the Stone.’”
The Yale professor is currently working on three projects: a book on how late imperial people conceived of objects and materiality, a collaborative project on the 16th-century playwright and painter Xu Wei, and a major digital initiative that will enable collaborative philological work.
Lu earned her undergraduate degree and her doctorate in comparative literature from Harvard University. She began her academic career as an assistant professor of Chinese literature at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2008, she joined the Yale faculty as a professor of Chinese literature. Lu has served as chair, director of graduate studies, and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. She has been a consulting faculty member to Yale-NUS College, where she taught as a visiting professor in spring 2015.
Lu is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, and the Mellon Foundation. In 2009, she was awarded the Gustav Ranis Prize for best book on an international subject by a Yale faculty member.
