Wang Labao is Professor of English at the School of English Studies, Shanghai International Studies University, China. He studied (with Elizabeth Webby) for his PhD from University of Sydney from 1995 to 1999. He was Dean of the School of Foreign Languages at Soochow University (2007-2016) and Director of Australia-China Institute for Arts and Culture at Western Sydney University (2017-2018). His research areas include English and American literature, Australian literature and other postcolonial literatures written in English, comparative literature and modern literary criticism and literary theories. He has carried out major research projects sponsored by the Chinese National Philosophy and Social Sciences Research Council. He is widely published in academic journals of China and internationally. Some of his books include A History of Australian Literary Criticism (winner of the 2015 national achievements award, China Social Sciences Press, 2016), The Purest Art: Euro-American Theories of the Short Story as a Literary Genre (Southeast University Press, 2006) , Australian Short Fiction in the 1980s: Continuity and Change (Soochow University Press, 2000), and The New Criticism (John Crowe Ransom, Chinese translation, Jiangsu Education Press, 2006), among other things. He supervises doctoral students and welcomes post-doctoral fellows. He is currently also an Adjunct Professor of Western Sydney University, Australia, and an Honorary Professor of English at a number of other universities in China. And he is Vice President of the National Australian Studies Association in China, and the Chinese Association for Studies in World Literatures Written in English, etc. And he was Founding Editor and Editor-in-Chief of Language and Semiotic Studies (2015-16).
