Andrea Bachner is a professor of comparative literature. She was the director of the East Asia Program for the term 2019-22 and a member of the East Asia Program steering committee and the CEAS editorial board. 

She holds an MA from Munich University, Germany, and a PhD from Harvard University. Her research explores comparative intersections between Sinophone, Latin American, and European cultural productions in dialogue with theories of interculturality, sexuality, and mediality.

Her first book, Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Cultures (Columbia University Press, 2014), analyzes how the Chinese script has been imagined in recent decades in literature and film, visual and performance art, design and architecture, both within Chinese cultural contexts and in different parts of the “West.” She is the co-editor (with Carlos Rojas) of the Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures (2016) and has published articles in Comparative Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, Concentric, German Quarterly, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Taller de Letras as well as in several edited volumes. Her second book is The Mark of Theory: Inscriptive Figures, Poststructuralist Prehistories (Fordham University Press, 2017).

She is currently working on two projects: the first, Against Comparison? Latin America and the Sinophone World, reflects on the limits of comparison through an exploration of the rich history of cultural contact, exchange, and affinity between Latin American and Chinese cultures from the late nineteenth century to today; the second, Membranicity, constitutes a critique of the deployment of surface metaphors in contemporary theory.