Haun Saussy

Caleb Powell Haun Saussy is the Bird White Housum Professor of Comparative and Chinese literature at Yale University.

Saussy's first book, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic , discussed the tradition of commentary that has grown up around the early Chinese poetry collection Shi jing . His most recent book is Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China , an account of the ways of knowing and describing specific to China scholarship. He is an avid cyclist, memorizer of verb paradigms and lyric poetry, and contributor to a variety of art installations. His articles range widely, from the imaginary universal languages of Athanasius Kircher to Chinese musicology to the great Qing dynasty novel Honglou meng. He edited the American Comparative Literature Association's 2004 report on the state of the discipline.

Haun Saussy joined the Yale faculty in 2004. Prior to that, he had been chairman of the comparative literature department at Stanford University. He is the son of Tupper Saussy. Raised in suburban Nashville,Tennessee, he attended Deerfield Academy and then received his B.A. from Duke University in 1981. He received his M.Phil and Ph.D from Yale in Comparative Literature. Between undergraduate and graduate schools, he studied linguistics and Chinese in Paris and Taiwan.

He is the current Graduate President of the Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.