Lanlan Du is a tenured Professor at Institute of Global Humanities, Nanjing University. She earned her PhD from Tsinghua University, China in 2009. After completing her postdoctoral work at Shanghai Jiaotong University in 2011, she became an associate professor at the School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. From January 2019 to July 2023, she was a professor and PhD supervisor there.

Du’s major research interests are in the fields of women’s writing, comparative literature and contemporary speculative fiction. As a Luce East-Asian Fellow of National Humanities Center in the United States, she worked on the project “Affective Dimensions of Precarity in Contemporary Chinese and English Fiction” and is currently working on the research project “World-building and Its Ethical Messages in Twenty-First Century English Speculative Fiction” granted by China National Social Science Fund.