Andrew Hui

Andrew Hui is a literary historian who traces the smallest turns of language to uncover the largest ideas.

The author of three books—The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries (Princeton 2025); A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter (Princeton, 2019, translated into five languages); and The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature (Fordham, 2017), he explores the movement of knowledge—how ideas migrate, traditions rupture, and new forms emerge.

His work has been reviewed in the New Yorker and Wall Street Journal and writings have appeared in Paris Review, Public Domain Review and LitHub. He has also spoken on BBC radio and Swiss TV.

After earning his PhD from Princeton, Hui held fellowships at the Warburg Institute in London, Villa I Tatti in Florence, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He taught for three years at Stanford as a postdoctoral fellow, and from 2012 to 2025, was one of the inaugural faculty members at Yale-NUS College (now defunct). He currently teaches at National University of Singapore, where he is at work on The Emperor’s Maze: the Jesuits in China and the Making of a Global Age.

As an Asian American teaching the European classics in Asia, he has devoted his life to studying the languages and cultures of both worlds.

Photo courtesy of Maurice Weiss