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 also the Book Review Editor of the American Quarterly.

Lai-Henderson's research is at the heart of transnational American Studies, where she locates works of American literature in twentieth-century China and in translation. She is the author of Mark Twain in China (Stanford UP, 2015). In addition to The Yale Review, MELUS, and Journal of Transnational American Studies, her work has appeared in Mark Twain in Context (2019) and Langston Hughes in Context (2022), both published by Cambridge UP. Her 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).

She has served as Chair and co-Chair (with Perin Gurel at Notre Dame) of American Studies Association’s International Committee (2022-2024). 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. In Spring 2025, she will be joining Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research as a Hutchins Family Fellow.

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.