Dr. Melody Yunzi Li is Associate Professor of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of Houston and affiliate faculty in Media and the Moving Image and Public History. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis and has held fellowships at Harvard University and the University of Hong Kong. Her research explores Chinese diasporic literature, translation, and digital storytelling.
Li is the author of Transpacific Cartographies: Narrating the Contemporary Chinese Diaspora in the U.S. (Rutgers University Press, 2023) and co-editor of Remapping the Homeland: Affective Geographies and Cultures of the Chinese Diaspora (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Her ongoing digital project, Mapping Houston’s Old Chinatown, reconstructs the city’s historic Chinese community through GIS and archival methods, connecting spatial history with questions of race and belonging.
