Anita Patterson is a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Harvard University and a professor of English at Boston University, specializing in American modernism, African American poetry, and Caribbean French literature. Her cross-border and cross-cultural research methods have originality and international influence. Patterson's major works include "From Emerson to King: Democracy, Race, and Protest Politics" and "Race, American Literature, and Transnational Modernism". In the summer of 2024, commissioned by the editorial department of Foreign Literature, the author conducted an exclusive interview with Patterson through email and offline interviews to explore his innovative contributions to transnational studies.

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Professor Anita Patterson's interest in transnational literature research stems from family history and personal experiences, particularly her mother's family's immigration from Japan to the United States and her father's family's history as Russian Jewish immigrants. She found that the term "transnational" first appeared in Bern's 1916 article, criticizing the notion that immigrants were seen as a "melting pot" fully integrated into Anglo Saxon culture, emphasizing that immigrants preserved certain aspects of their own culture, making American society "transnational". Paterson's research track includes exploring the influence of Asian culture on American literature, Japanese American poetry creation in concentration camps, and how transnational black poets in the United States and the Caribbean use haiku as a genre. She believes that transnational literary research involves history, politics, and aesthetics, exploring how literary genres and lyrical works can transcend specific ethnic, national, and cultural contexts for dissemination, and striving to change these cultures. The study of transnational literature originated from postcolonialism and American studies, aiming to dissolve the stability of national identity composition. Patterson believes that adopting a transnational approach to the study of American literature can expand our understanding of literary creation, dissemination, and reception, and explore the complexity and far-reaching impact of America's reciprocal position in the global exchange network. The transnational framework does not mean the disappearance of the concept of the state, but rather a rethinking of it, helping scholars to acknowledge the intertwined history through cautious relativism, while refuting the narrow-minded and triumphalist views of neoliberal globalization.

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Patterson adopts a transnational historicist perspective in the study of transnational literature, emphasizing the importance of formal analysis in American literature and transnational modernist research. He explores the intertextual resonance between African American poets in the United States and the Caribbean through case studies, and draws on the research findings of scholars such as Luo, Kaplan, and Pease. Patterson believes that a transnational framework helps to understand the flow of black people and black culture, revealing new connections and differences between texts. He advocates placing the history and culture of different countries in dialogue, studying geography, mobility, and the cross connections between ethnic, regional, and dispersed groups, exploring the process of building national borders and the interdependence between countries and communities.