Shu-mei Shih

Shu-mei Shih is a Taiwanese-American literary theorist. She is Professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and was the president of the American Comparative Literature Association from 2021 to 2022. In 2018, she was also appointed as Honorary Chair Professor of Taiwan Languages, Literature and Culture at National Taiwan Normal University and is the current director of the UCLA-NTNU Taiwan Studies Initiative of the UCLA Asia Pacific Center.

Early life and education Shih was born in 1961 in South Korea as a Republic of China citizen to Chinese immigrant parents who escaped from Shandong around 1947 during the second phase of the Chinese Civil War (1945–49). She completed her primary and secondary education in Chinese-language schools sponsored by the Republic of China government in Korea. In 1978, Shih passed her college entrance examination and went to National Taiwan Normal University, where she studied English with Shakespearean scholar Tsu-wen Chen.

Shih is known for her work in the field of Sinophone studies, a field that takes as its object of study "Sinitic-language communities and cultures outside China as well as ethnic minority communities and cultures within China where Mandarin is adopted or imposed."

Honors and awards Shih was elected to the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities in 2013. In 2018, National Taiwan Normal University named Shih as a distinguished alumni.