hsuan l. hsu joined the UC Davis faculty in 2008. His research areas include 19th and 20th-Century U.S. literature, Asian diasporic literature, race studies, cultural geography, sensory studies, and the environmental humanities. He is the author of Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge, 2010), Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain, Asia, and Comparative Racialization (NYU, 2015), The Smell of Risk: Atmospheric Disparities and the Olfactory Arts (NYU, 2020), and Air Conditioning (Bloomsbury Object Lessons, 2024). He is currently completing on a book that considers how artists and writers have been experimenting with smell as a medium sensorial worldmaking.

Hsuan's recent courses have examined topics such as geographies of risk, transnational American literature, medical humanities, the aesthetics of atmosphere, the aesthetics of chemosensation, and race and realism. He received an Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award for Graduate teaching and mentoring in 2026. He serves (or has served) on the editorial and advisory boards of American Literature, Literary Geographies, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, American Literary Realism, Genre: Forms of Dicourse and Culture; EurAmerica, Multimodality & Society, Venti: Air, Experience, Aesthetics, and the Broadview Anthology of American Literature, the Executive Council of the American Literature Society, and the Executive Committees of the MLA's forum for Nineteenth-Century American Literature and for Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities; he has been book review editor for Senses and Society and the Journal of Transnational American Studies. His research has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Davis Humanities Institute, the Andy Warhol Foundation's Arts Writers Program, Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the UC Humanities Research Institute, and the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies.