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Jing Tsu

Ambassador

Jing Tsu is a non-fiction writer and cultural historian of modern China and specializes in history, literature, linguistics, science and technology. Born in Taiwan to parents of mainland Chinese heritage, she immigrated to the United States at the age of nine and was raised in the only Chinese family in a small town of 35,000 inhabitants in New Mexico. Currently John M. Schiff Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures & Comparative Literature and a member of the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale, she has written for The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and Financial Times. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The New Yorker, The Economist, Wired, Science, Nature, Physics World, The Times, The Spectator, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Scotsman, Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), NRC (The Netherlands), Frankfurter Allgemeine (Germany), among others. Her most recent non-fiction book, Kingdom of Characters: The Revolution That Made China Modern (Riverhead, 2022), was nominated for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, the Cundhill History Prize, and the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. It was named among The New York Times “100 Notable Books of 2022” and The Washington Post’s “Best Non-Fiction of 2022.”  Tsu was also the cultural expert commentator for America’s national television network NBC at the Beijing Olympics 2022.