Nan Da (University of Michigan, Ph.D.) is assistant professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Her scholarly essays have been published in American Literary History, Signs, J19, and The Henry James Review. She has also published in The Los Angeles Review of Books and Public Books.Nan Z. Da is an assistant professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.

R. John Williams, author of The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West:
Intransitive Encounter offers nothing less than a complete reimagining of the literary encounter. With acuity, archival sensitivity, and analytic insight, Nan Z. Da argues that previous assumptions about transnational literary contact have perpetuated a hermeneutic that crosses out as much as it crosses over—and that what gets crossed out is precisely an opportunity to see the literary as a different kind of encounter.

Virginia Jackson, University of California, Irvine:
Nan Z. Da has written the first great book on nineteenth-century Sino-U.S. literary relations and a truly great book on the current state of comparative literature. Da's beautiful readings of what she calls the many 'intransitive encounters' between Chinese and American literature demonstrate the ways in which the idea of a global, East-West world literature is a fantasy that obscures the much more interesting differences, failures, and untranslatable moments that have generated a long history of literary criticism. This book should be required reading for students and scholars of American and comparative literature.

Robert S. Levine, author of Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies:
In this bracingly intelligent and impressively researched study of nineteenth-century Sino-U.S. encounters, Nan Z. Da focuses on transnational exchanges in which not much of anything is exchanged and worlds are not transformed. The result is a transformative book that challenges assumptions about transnationalism and maps out productive new ways of exploring the limits of cultural exchange.