Dr. Yun-Chu Tsai
Associate Professor and Director of the Chinese Program
Chinese
Dr. Tiffany Yun-Chu Tsai is Director of the Chinese Program and Associate Professor of Chinese in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina. Her first monograph, Cannibalism as Pathology: China’s Modernity in Crisis, examines the paradoxical logic of auto-cannibalism that underlies China’s modernization. Dr. Tsai demonstrates how China conceptualizes its national (in)security by incorporating colonial discourses of “civilizing missions” and biomedical knowledge (in cellular cannibalism). The discourses thereby develop a revolutionary rhetoric of cannibalizing “enemies of the state.” Her study of the cannibalism discourse theorizes the path and pathology of China’s modernity, especially in the contexts of “Serve the People” in the revolutionary era and “Serving People” in the post-revolutionary era.
Dr. Tsai is on a sabbatical leave in Fall 2025 in preparation for writing and publishing her first monograph. She is a two-time awardee of The Citadel’s Provost Office’s Faculty Summer Research Grants. Dr. Tsai has published a book chapter, “Cannibalism as Pathology: China’s Modernity in Crisis,” in New Vocabularies of May Fourth Studies. She has also published three journal articles, “A ‘Consuming Identity’ in China’s Modernity: Contextualizing Cannibalism in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature,” “Cannibal Labyrinth: Narrative, Intertextuality, and Politics of Cannibalism in Mo Yan’s The Republic of Wine,” and “Sinicizing Islam: Translating the Gulistan of Sa‘di in Modern China.”
At The Citadel, Dr. Tsai has developed and taught twelve new literature and culture courses and has taught all levels of Chinese language courses. In Summer 2024, Dr. Tsai was awarded a national fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities Institutes for Higher Education Faculty and thereby participated in the Academy of Korean Studies Summer Institute: Infusing Korean Studies in American Undergraduate Higher Education.
Since Fall 2017, Dr. Tsai has advised the Chinese Club and has led study abroad programs in Taiwan. The study abroad programs are intended to provide Chinese-language students (including those without Chinese study experience) with immersive exposure to the language. If you have any questions, please contact Dr. Tsai.
Degrees
Ph.D. East Asian Languages and Literatures (University of California, Irvine)
M.A. English (State University of New York)
B.A. English (National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan)