Pauline Yu (2016) served as president from 2003 to 2019 of the American Council of Learned Societies, a non-profit federation of 75 scholarly organizations that has been the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences since 1919. She was previously dean of humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1994 to 2003, founding chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Irvine (1989 to 1994), and professor at Columbia University (1985 to 1989) and the University of Minnesota (1976 to 1985). She received her B.A. in history and literature from Harvard University, her M.A. and Ph.D. in comparative literature from Stanford University, and holds five honorary degrees. An elected member of the American Philosophical Society and Committee of 100, she is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served on its board since 2013. In addition, she is a member of the Board of Directors of the Teagle Foundation (2003), the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (2010), and the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation (2014). She is the author or editor of five books and numerous articles on Chinese and comparative literature and the humanities, and in 2020 she joined the Advisory Board of the Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature.