Overview
Selina Lai-Henderson is Associate Professor of American Literature and History at Duke Kunshan University, where she is the co-director of the Humanities Research Center (alongside Carlos Rojas at Duke). She is on the editorial board of the American Quarterly, and was the 2024-25 Hutchins Family Fellow in the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.
Her monograph-in-progress, “You Are No Darker Than I Am”: Writers of Transnational Blackness in Twentieth-Century China, reveals both compelling and competing transracial visions across different historic moments in China and in Chinese translation. She is the author of Mark Twain in China (Stanford, 2015), and her work has appeared in The Yale Review, MELUS, and Journal of Transnational American Studies, as well as book chapters in Mark Twain in Context (Cambridge, 2019) and Langston Hughes in Context (Cambridge, 2022). Her essay, "You Are No Darker Than I Am: The Souls of Black Folk in Maoist China" (PMLA, Sep 2023), is the 2023 recipient of the 1921 Prize in American Literature in the tenured category.
Lai-Henderson served as Chair and co-Chair (with Perin Gurel at Notre Dame) of American Studies Association’s International Committee (2022-2024). She has also recently served on the judging panel for the ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies)’s Open Access Book Prize in Literary Studies. She was previously a senior Associate Managing Editor for the Journal of Transnational American Studies, and is on the advisory board of Global Nineteenth Century Studies.