Olivia Lingyi Xu

Olivia Lingyi Xu joins the FAS as Assistant Professor of English. She is a scholar of Anglophone and Sinophone literary traditions of the long nineteenth century, with research and teaching interests in novel theory, translation studies, comparative empire, and global Asias studies.

Xu is working on a book project that traces a translational history of the novel amid the tectonic shifts of two world language regimes in the long nineteenth century: the rise of global English and the decline of Literary Sinitic (Classical Chinese) as a literary lingua franca in East Asia.  

Xu has also begun work on two other projects. One examines the global trade networks of the Canton System in the long nineteenth century, while the other explores the intertwined histories of two revolutionary literary and hermeneutic movements in the early twentieth-century Anglophone and Sinophone worlds: New Criticism and the New Culture Movement.  

Xu holds a BA and a MPhil in English Studies from the University of Hong Kong and received her PhD in English from Northwestern University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the journals of PMLA, ELH, Comparative Literature, Victorian Studies, and Modern Fiction Studies.