Nicolai Volland is Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Penn State University. His research focuses on modern Chinese/Sinophone literature and culture, Taiwan literature, and oceanic/archipelagic studies. He is the author of Socialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe, 1945-1965 (2017) and he is currently completing work on a monograph tentatively called Modern Chinese Literature and the Sea. He is a past president of the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature (ACCL).