Nan Z Da 笪章难 is an associate professor in the Department of English. She taught at the University of Notre Dame in the departments of English and East Asian Language and Literatures for nine years 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. Her book, Intransitive Encounters (Columbia University Press 2018), asks about literary-cultural interactions that do not lead to synthesis, reflecting both phenomenological reality and various predicaments of global modernity.  Her other published works discuss the mechanisms of disambiguation, literature and complexity, parrhesia and literary criticism, and contemporary Chinese history.

She has taught courses on Transcendentalism and its aftermaths, discourses of China, literature and social theory, as well as traditional survey courses on pre-1850 American literature, world literature, and comparative methodologies. Courses taught at Johns Hopkins will include "Literary Studies as Data Science" and "Nineteenth-Century American Literature.”

With Professor Anahid Nersessian she edits the Thinking Literature series housed at the University of Chicago Press

Scholarly Publications

• "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

• Literary-critical memoir: “The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear” Forthcoming from Princeton University Press. 
• Academic monograph, “On Disambiguation: Literary Criticism and the Chinese Diaspora.”
• Academic monograph tentatively titled “Literary Studies, Data Science, and the Future of Prejudice.”

Forthcoming Talks

• “Translation’s Long Tail” MLA, Philadelphia, January 7, 2024
• “Inferred Data” for symposium on “The Mathematics of Small Data Analysis,” Einstein Forum, Berlin, January 18, 2024
• “Inferred Data” for conference on “Memetics and Mimesis”, Dartmouth University, February 23, 2024
• “On Real and Artificial Intelligence”, Humanities Center, Texas Tech University, March 7, 2024
• “How to Know What Has Been Done with Words”, ACLA, Montreal, March 14-17, 2024
• “Inferred Data”, for symposium on “AI and the Arts Humanities Symposium”, Iowa State University, March 21-22, 2024
• “On Real and Artificial Intelligence”, Boston College, April 4, 2024
• “Transitive Encounters”, Penn State University, Fall 2024