Nick Admussen is an associate professor of Chinese literature and the past director of the Contemporary China Initiative.

He holds an MFA in poetry writing from Washington University in St. Louis and a PhD in East Asian studies from Princeton. At Cornell, his teaching centers on Chinese literature and culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His research applies close reading, translation, techniques from sociology, and literary theory in an attempt to read and understand contemporary poetry, and by extension to invent and refine methods of interpretation through which people separated by linguistic or political distance can come to understand one another.