Zong-qi Cai

Zong-qi Cai is Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, positions he has held since his promotion to full professor in 2003 after serving as assistant professor from 1993 to 1998 and associate professor from 1998 to 2003. He also holds appointments as Professor in the Program in Comparative and World Literature and the Program in Medieval Studies. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at SUNY Stony Brook from 1990 to 1992. Additionally, Cai serves as Lee Wing-tat Chair Professor of Chinese Literature and Director of the Advanced Institute for Global Chinese Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, since 2013. He earned his Ph.D. in Chinese Literature from Princeton University in 1991, M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1987, M.A. in English Literature from Zhongshan University, China in 1981, and completed undergraduate work in English Literature at Zhongshan University in 1979.

Cai's research specializes in premodern Chinese literature, Chinese poetry, classical Chinese poetry, literary criticism, comparative literature, and philosophy. He has authored and edited numerous scholarly books, including Chinese Theories of Literary Creation: A Historical and Critical Introduction (Duke University Press, 2024), How to Read Chinese Prose: A Guided Anthology (Columbia University Press, 2022), How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context: Poetic Culture from Antiquity through the Tang (Columbia University Press, 2018), Chinese Aesthetics: The Ordering of Literature, Arts, and the Universe in the Six Dynasties (University of Hawaii Press, 2004), A Chinese Literary Mind: Culture, Creativity, and Rhetoric in Wenxin diaolong (Stanford University Press, 2001), and How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology (Columbia University Press, 2008). He is general editor of the ten-volume How to Read Chinese Literature series (Columbia University Press), co-founding editor-in-chief of Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture (Duke University Press), editor of Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature (Duke University Press), and editor-in-chief of Lingnan Journal of Chinese Studies. In recognition of his editorial work, Cai received the 2020 Distinguished Editor Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. His scholarship has reinvigorated the research and teaching of Chinese poetry in the English-speaking world.

Professional Email: z-cai@illinois.edu