Jing Tsu is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. She specializes in modern Chinese literature and culture from the 19th century to the present. Her research areas include nationalism, race, diaspora, Sinophone literature, transnational labor, history of science, and different approaches to largescale literary and cultural studies. Author of Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity, 18951937 and Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora, Professor Tsu is also coeditor (with David Derwei Wang, Harvard) of Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays and (with Benjamin A. Elman, Princeton)Science in Republican China (forthcoming). We talk with her about her most recent published book, Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora.