Prof. Jack Chen

Jack W. Chen is Professor of Chinese Literature; Director of the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures (or IHGC); and Department Chair of East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Virginia. Trained in comparative literature at the University of Michigan and Harvard University, he is the author of The Poetics of Sovereignty: On Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty (2010) and Anecdote, Network, Gossip, Performance: Essays on the Shishuo xinyu (2021), as well as co-editor of Idle Talk: Gossip and Anecdote in Traditional China (2013), Literary Information in China: A History (2021), and Literary History in and beyond China: Reading Text and World (2023). He has also published articles and essays on topics such as the poetry of Du Fu, donkey-braying, topic modeling, and network visualization. Jack has taught at Wellesley College and UCLA, prior to joining the faculty at UVA. At UVA, he was director of the Reading Lab (2023–2025) and co-director of the Humanities Informatics Lab (2017–2020). He is broadly interested in lyric theory, computational approaches to literary analysis, information histories, comparative methodologies, and cats. His current work includes the co-edited six volume A Cultural History of Chinese Literatures (Bloomsbury), a book-length study of poems composed by ghosts in medieval China, and an international project on the complex pasts, critical presents, and possible futures of the university.