Tianyun Hua

Tianyun Hua is a GPS Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU Shanghai. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from University of California, Davis, and her M.A. and B.A. from Peking University.

Tianyun studies the subaltern diasporas of Global Asias from the nineteenth to twentieth century, with particular attention to the intersections of Sinophone/Chinese literature, labor, race, and the environment. Her book project, Coolie Crossings: Transnational Labor Migration and Sinophone Literature, 1900-1949, combines archival and literary methodologies to trace the genealogy of race and labor in Sinophone narratives across continents, examining how literature engaged with the lived realities of transnational labor migration to critique global racial capitalism. She is also working on a second project on transpacific botanical network in the twentieth century, drawing on critical plant studies, history of science, and literary and media studies. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of America-East Asian Relations and Victorian Studies, and has received the Frank Gibney Award (JAER) and an Honorable Mention for the A. Owen Aldridge Prize (ACLA).

As an educator, Tianyun in committed to interdisciplinary, inclusive, and innovative teaching. She has independently designed and taught courses on Chinese literature, Chinese film, Chinese popular culture, Asian American literature and culture, world literature in the modern era, and was invited to give guest seminars in East Asian and Southeast Asian studies. She is also dedicated to public humanities, having co-initiated a series of community-oriented programs examining migration, food, and culinary labor to explore how academia and the communities we inhabit can engage reciprocally.

Select Publications

• “Law, Literature, and Poetic Justice: The Chinese Exclusion Act and Late-Qing Boycott Novels,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations, 32, 1 (2025): 9-36, doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/18765610-32010003 (*2024 Frank Gibney Award in American-East Asian Relations, 2023-2024 A. Owen Aldridge Prize Winner (Honorable Mention), ACLA)
• “Toward a Poetics of the Plantationocene: British Plantations and Sinophone Rubber Literature,” Victorian Studies 67(3), forthcoming Spring 2025.
• (Translation) Bertolt Brecht 贝托尔特·布莱希特 by Philip Glahn, Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House上海文艺出版社, 2023.

Education

• PhD, Comparative Literature
  University of California, Davis
• MA, Modern Chinese Literature
  Peking University
• BA, Finance and Economics (Major) & Chinese Literature (Minor)
  Peking University