Professor Delin Lai has held the Morgan Endowed Chair in Art and Architectural History since 2018.

Before joining the Department of Art and Design at the University of Louisville in 2007, Professor Delin Lai taught at Oberlin College from 2006 to 2007. His research focuses on modern Chinese architecture and the historiography of Chinese architecture. In these fields, he has published three books in Chinese: Zhongguo Jindai Sixiangshi yu Jianzhu Shixueshi (Changing Ideals in Modern China and Its Historiography of Architecture, Beijing: Zhongguo Jianzhu Gongye Chubanshe, 2016); Zhongguo Jianzhu Geming: Minguo Zaoqi de Lizhi Jianzhu (Ritual Architecture of Early Republican China and the Cult of Sun Yat-sen, Taipei: Boya Shuwu, 2011); and Zhongguo Jindai Jianzhushi Yanjiu (Studies in Modern Chinese Architectural History, Beijing: Tsinghua University Press, 2007).

He has also edited two books, one being the five-volume Zhongguo Jindai Jianzhu Shi (A History of Modern Chinese Architecture, Beijing: Zhongguo Jianzhu Gongye Chubanshe, 2016), of which he was the Lead Editor and co-author.  In 2018, this book was one of the fifty seven works that received the Book Award at the triennial China Publication Government Awards, the highest award for Chinese publications (https://baike.baidu.com/item/第四届中国出版政府奖/21600713). The other is Jindai Zhejiang Lu (Who’s Who in Modern Chinese Architecture, 2006).  This book is one of ten books that received the First Architectural Book Award of China in 2008.

Professor Lai has also published numerous articles in Chinese, English, Japanese and Italian, among them “Searching for a Modern Chinese Monument: the Design of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing, 1925-1929” and “Idealizing a Chinese Style: Rethinking Early Writings on Chinese Architecture and the Design of the National Central Museum in Nanjing” in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (March 2005 and March 2014); "Renewing, Remapping, and Redefining Guangzhou, 1910s-1930s" in Looking Modern: East Asian Visual Culture from Treaty Ports to World War II (Jennifer Purtle and Hans Bjarne Thomsen, eds., 2009); “An Essay on WANG Shu - About the Way of Revival and Development for the Literati's Architecture Tradition in China,” in Special Issue on contemporary Chinese architecture, Nemoha (2014); and “Translated Architecture and the Notion of Architectural Translatability in Modern China,” in The Influence of Western Architecture in China (Nilda Valentin, ed., (English-Italian), 2017).

Professor Delin Lai received the 2015 University of Louisville Distinguished Faculty Award in Outstanding Scholarship, Research, and Creative Activity in the Humanities.