Nan Z Da 笪章难 is an associate professor in the Department of English. She taught at the University of Notre Dame for nine years in the departments of English and East Asian Language and Literatures before moving to Johns Hopkins. 

Da's teaching and scholarship cover nineteenth-century American and trans-Atlantic literature and letters, modern Chinese literature and letters, literary and social theory, and the intersection of literary studies and the data sciences. She is interested in empiricism and its difficult cases, the mechanisms of disambiguation, and the relationships between literature and complexity and parrhesia and literary criticism.

She has taught courses on American transcendentalism, 20^th century Chinese culture and history, literary- and social theory, as well as traditional survey courses on 19^th century American literature and world literature. This fall she will teach "Literary Studies as Data Science" and "Introduction to Literary Studies."

With Professor Andrea Gadberry she edits the Thinking Literature series housed at the University of Chicago Press.

Scholarly Publications

• "Have a Good Time: an Essay on the Sestina" Modern Philology
• "Aesthetic Bearings" PMLA 
• "Other People's Books" New Literary History
• "Transnationalism as Metahistoriography"  American Literary History
• "Emerson, China, and the Uses of Literature" Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature
• "On the Decipherment of Modern China and Spurned Lovers" Signs (+ special issue introduction)
• "Lao She, James and Reading Time" Henry James Review
• "Mere Formalities; or ,how Canonicity Speaks its Love" Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature

On Literary Studies and Computational Analysis 

• "The Computational Case Against Computational Literary Studies" Critical Inquiry
• "The Digital Humanities Debacle" Chronicle Review
• "Critical Response: on EDA, Complexity, and Redundancy" Critical Inquiry

Reviews and Other Essays

• "Into the Woods with Yiyun Li" Public Books
• "Curious Crossings: a conversation with Jessica Swoboda" The Point
• Forum with Lingchei Letty Chen, Frank Dikotter and Jie Li, Los Angeles Review of Books
• "Review of Emily Sun's On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China" Nineteenth-Century Literature
• "Disambiguation, a Tragedy" nplusone (Video forum with Jane Hu and Elaine Auyoung)
• "It is Useless to Live: on Squandering in Chinese Poetry" Times Literary Supplement
• "Language After the Fact" Los Angeles Review of Books
• "China at World's End" Public Books
• "The Gift of a Reasonable Desire" Avidly
• "Review of Sharon Cameron's The Bond of the Furthest Apart" Comparative Literature
• "Review of Marta Figlerowicz's Flat Protagonists" modernism/modernity
• "Review of Christina Lupton's Reading and the Making of Time" Hedgehog Review
• "Review of Yiyun Li's Where Reasons End" The Georgia Review
• "Review of Shouhua Qi's Western Literature in China and the Translation of a Nation" Journal of Asian Studies
• "The Angelus" The Yale Review

Works in Progress

• Generalist literary criticism: “The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear” Forthcoming from Princeton University Press, June 2025
• Academic monograph, “On Disambiguation: Literary Criticism and the Chinese Diaspora.”
• Academic monograph, “Literary Studies, Data Science, and the Future of Prejudice.”
• “How to Know What Has Been Done with Words” Special issue collection co-organized with Matthew Hunter 

Forthcoming Talks

• “The Location of Literary Criticism” Princeton University Society of Fellows, Symposium on “Interdisciplinarity: Past, Present, and Future” Sept 27, 2024
• “The Difference Between Real and Artificial Intelligence, Beginning with Entailment”  Boston University Colloquium on Literature, Philosophy, and Aesthetics, November 8-9, 2024
• “Henry James’s Reliability” MLA, Panel on “How to Do Things with Fiction”, January 9-12, 2025
• “On Literary-Critical Tragedies: Iris Chang, Max Yeh, and Ken Liu” Penn State University, January 27, 2025