Pauline Yu

Pauline Yu became president of the American Council of Learned Societies in July 2003, having served as dean of humanities in the College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Los Angeles and professor of East Asian languages and cultures from 1994-2003. Prior to that appointment, she was founding chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature at the University of California, Irvine (1989-1994) and on the faculty of Columbia University (1985-89) and the University of Minnesota (1976-85). She received her B.A. in history and literature from Harvard University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in comparative literature from Stanford University. She is the author or editor of five books and dozens of articles on classical Chinese poetry, literary theory, comparative poetics, and issues in the humanities and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She was awarded the William Riley Parker Prize for best PMLA article of 2007.

A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and Committee of 100, she is on the Academy's national Commission on the Humanities & Social Sciences. She serves on the Board of Trustees of the National Humanities Center, the Board of Directors of both the Teagle Foundation and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, and the Scholars’ Council of the Library of Congress. In addition, she is a trustee of the Asian Cultural Council and the American Academy in Berlin and a member of the Advisory Board of the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University and the Board of Governors of the Hong Kong-America Center. From 2003-09, she served on the Harvard Board of Overseers. Yu is an adjunct senior research scholar and visiting professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University.