Faculty Fellow

Haun Saussy

University Professor with appointments in Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages & Civilizations, and Committee on Social Thought University of Chicago

Biography

Professor Saussy's primary teaching and research interests include classical Chinese poetry and commentary, literary theory, comparative study of oral traditions, problems of translation, pre-twentieth-century media history, and ethnography and ethics of medical care.

His 2022 book, Making of Barbarians: China in Multilingual Asia reminds us that, far from being on the margins of “world literature,” China has been a center in its own right for thousands of years and has long appropriated the speech and artistry of its alien neighbors, changing their forms and meanings in the process. His current project is the editing of a multi-author international literary history of Asia from the Bronze Age to the present.

For more on Saussy's publications, research, and interests, please visit his faculty page.

hsaussy@uchicago.edu

Topics

Featured Project

Motion and Meaning: Sign and Body Gesture in Dance Narratives Across Cultures

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2018 – 2021

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Projects

Sastram

This interdisciplinary collaboration examined the forms and intersecting histories of South Asian practices of knowledge, with a focus on the geographical and historical spread of cultural norms and technologies.

The Sanskrit word śāstra, from a verb meaning “to discipline, to govern,” supplies a blanket term for a vast and heterogeneous spectrum of Southern Asian texts and the social forms in which these have been propagated. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the very basis of South Asian ...

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2019 – 2020

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Textual Optics

An interdisciplinary group of scholars collaborated in a lab-like environment to formulate a unique, data-driven approach to the reading and interpretation of textual archives, from single words up to millions of volumes.

With the rise of the digital humanities has come the promise of new methods of exploring literary texts on an unprecedented scale. How does our approach to literature and literary history change when the canon expands to include millions of texts—all of them immediately analyzable by cutting-edge ...

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2017 – 2020

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A Comparative History of East Asian Literatures

Working to correct a gap in scholarship on East Asian cultural history, this project conceptualized a cross-border, long-term, multilingual history of the literature of the region.

The regional cultures of East Asia are porous and mutually influencing. The major literary tradition in the area, that of China, has integrated forms and materials from all its neighbors, as well as transferring aspects of culture to them. But the history of these cultural flows—among Chinese, ...

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Haun Saussy

2017 – 2018

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Comparative Literature

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History, Philology, and the Nation in the Chinese Humanities

Four Visiting Fellows joined University scholars to explore the writing of Chinese history from the perspective of “New National Studies.” Discussions centered on how history writing helps shape our understanding of the present.

History-writing in China often strikes U.S. readers as nationalistic and therefore “out of step” with Euro-American common practice. Our assumption was rather that the historiographic conventions differ, and require a reading that engages, as do Chinese humanists, with philosophical questions drawn ...

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2013 – 2016

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