UC Welcomes Larissa Lai as Richard Charles Lee Chair in Chinese Canadian Studies
We are delighted to announce that Professor Larissa Lai has joined UC's Canadian Studies Program as the Richard Charles Lee Chair in Chinese Canadian Studies with a graduate appointment in the Department of English. Professor Lai is one of the leading scholars of Chinese Canadian and Asian Canadian literary studies and has an established international reputation of excellence, both as a scholar and as an acclaimed author of fiction and poetry. She joins us from the University of Calgary, where she served as Professor and Canada Research Chair II in Creative Writing in the Department of English, as well as the Director of the Insurgent Architects’ House for Creative Writing. Professor Lai previously held appointments as Assistant and Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia.
A prolific author, Professor Lai’s scholarship has frequently been funded by SSHRC awards. She is the author of numerous scholarly articles as well as the monograph Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s (2014), which was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism. She is currently working on a critical book titled The Littoral Contact Zone that focuses on Asian, Indigenous, and Black relations. Some of her most notable creative works include The Lost Century (2022), Iron Goddess of Mercy (2021), The Tiger Flu (2018), Salt Fish Girl (2002), and When Fox Is a Thousand (1995). In 2019, The Tiger Flu won the Lambda Literary Award and was named to the Otherwise (formerly James Tiptree Jr.) Honor List. Most recently, Professor Lai was awarded the Jim Duggins Mid-Career Novelist’s Award in 2020. She has also won awards for her superior teaching, including the Great Supervisor Award (2019) from the Faculty of Graduate Studies at the University of Calgary.
The endowed Richard Charles Lee Chair plays a key role for both the Canadian Studies Program and the Asian Canadian Minor at University College. This position acts as a nodal point for Asian Canadian and Asian North American Studies at the University of Toronto at large, and UC is thrilled to welcome Professor Lai to this important and timely role.
"I am truly delighted to take up my new role as Richard Charles Lee Chair of Chinese Canadian Studies, help strengthen the Canadian Studies Program and the Asian Canadian Minor at University College, and to advance the work of building Asian Canadian community in Toronto, across the country and around the world," Dr. Lai states. "It is such an honour to enter the brilliant and engaged company of knowledge makers and community builders here, and I very much look forward to the work we are going to do together."