Carlos Rojas's research focuses on issues of gender and visuality, corporeality and infection, and nationalism and diaspora studies.  He is the author of The Naked Gaze: Reflections on Chinese Modernity (Harvard University Asia Center, 2008), The Great Wall: A Cultural History (Harvard University Press, 2010), and Homesickness: Culture, Contagions, and National Reform in Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2015), which looks at Chinese discourses of corporeality and infection over the long twentieth century. He the co-editor, with David Der-wei Wang, of Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History (Duke University Press, 2007), with Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, of both Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture: Cannibalizations of the Canon (Routledge: 2009) and the The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas (Oxford University Press, 2013), and, with Andrea Bachner, of The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures (Oxford University Press, 2015). Finally, he is the co-translator, again with Eileen Chow, of Yu Hua’s two-volume novel, Brothers (Pantheon, 2009), and is the translator of Yan Lianke’s novels Lenin's Kisses (Grove/Atlantic Press, 2012) and The Four Books (Grove/Atlantic Press, 2015).

He teaches on a variety of topics ranging from prostitutes and vampires to cities, migration, and disease.

Beginning in Fall 2015, he will co-direct the Story Lab Humanities Lab.