Selina Lai-Henderson is Associate Professor of American Literature and History at Duke Kunshan University, where she is the co-director of the Humanities Research Center (alongside Carlos Rojas at Duke). She is on the editorial board of the American Quarterly (flagship journal of the American Studies Association), and is currently a non-resident Fellow, following her spring 2025 residency, in the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.

Her monograph-in-progress, “You Are No Darker Than I Am”: Writers of Transnational Blackness in Twentieth-Century China (under contract with Princeton University Press), reveals both compelling and conflicting transracial visions inspired by the work of Langston Hughes, Mu Shiying, W.E.B Du Bois, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Toni Morrison. She is the author of Mark Twain in China (Stanford University Press, 2015), and her work has appeared in The Yale Review, MELUS, and Journal of Transnational American Studies, as well as book chapters in Mark Twain in Context (2019) and Langston Hughes in Context (2022), both published by Cambridge University Press. Her recent essay, "You Are No Darker Than I Am: The Souls of Black Folk in Maoist China" (PMLA, Sep 2023), is the 2023 winner of the 1921 Prize in American Literature (tenured category).

Lai-Henderson has served as Chair and co-Chair (with Perin Gurel at Notre Dame) of American Studies Association’s International Committee (2022-2024). In 2025, she served on the judging panel for the ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies)’s Open Access Book Prize in Literary Studies. She was previously a senior Associate Managing Editor for the Journal of Transnational American Studies, and is on the advisory board of Global Nineteenth Century Studies.

Lai-Henderson has a B.A. in English and comparative literature and a Ph.D. in American studies from The University of Hong Kong (HKU), and an M.A. in American studies from Heidelberg University, Germany. She was also a Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University.