Haun Saussy is University Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, a position he has held since joining the faculty in 2011 as the 17th recipient of this distinguished title. He earned his A.B. summa cum laude with honors in Greek and Comparative Literature from Duke University in 1981, studied linguistics and Chinese at the Institut National des Langues et Cultures Orientales and the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, completed the Inter-University Program in Chinese Language and Literature in Taipei from 1984 to 1985, and received his M.Phil. in 1987 and Ph.D. in 1990 from Yale University in Comparative Literature. Prior to his appointment at Chicago, Saussy served as Assistant Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1990 to 1995, Associate Professor at Stanford University from 1995 to 2001, Professor at Stanford from 2002 to 2004, and Professor of Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Literatures, and International and Area Studies at Yale University from 2004 to 2011. He was President of the American Comparative Literature Association from 2009 to 2011 and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, elected in 2009. Saussy also holds memberships on the Faculty Advisory Board for the University of Chicago Neubauer Family Collegium for Culture and Society.

Saussy's primary teaching and research interests include classical Chinese poetry and commentary, literary theory, the comparative study of oral traditions, problems of translation, pre-twentieth-century media history, and the ethnography and ethics of medical care in resource-poor settings. His major monographs are The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (Stanford University Press, 1993), Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies (Fordham University Press, 2016), Translation as Citation: Zhuangzi Inside Out (Oxford University Press, 2017), Are We Comparing Yet? On Standards, Justice, and Incomparability (Bielefeld University Press, 2019), and The Making of Barbarians: China in Multilingual Asia (Princeton University Press, 2022). Among his edited volumes are Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), Sinographies: Writing China (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader (University of California Press, 2010), and A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep (Hidden): Selected Writings of Li Zhi (Columbia University Press, 2016). Saussy has received the René Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association for The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic in 1996 and for Translation as Citation in 2018, the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize in Comparative Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association for The Ethnography of Rhythm in 2017, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014-2015, and a John P. Birkelund Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin in 2018. His scholarship in Literature has garnered over 3,700 citations on Google Scholar.

Professional Email: hsaussy@uchicago.edu