Zhang Songjian is an associate professor with tenure at the School of Humanities, NTU. He earned a PhD in Chinese Studies from National University of Singapore where he was awarded President's Graduate Fellowship and Graduate Studies Scholarship. Afterwards he worked as a Post-doc Fellow in Tsinghua University and later as an associate professor in Capital Normal University, Beijing, China. Zhang was the recipient of numerous grants, the funding agencies include Tsinghua University, China Ministry of Education, China Ministry of Human Resources, and Beijing Council for Humanities and Social Sciences, etc. Zhang received the honor “Distinguished Post-doc Research Fellow ” from Tsinghua University (Beijing) in June 2010, and was awarded “Excellent Book Prize for Humanities and Social Sciences” in October 2012.

Zhang joined NTU faculty as an assistant professor in July 2013. He received a number of grants to conduct research projects and organize international conferences, e.g. NTU Start-Up Grant, CCK Foundation, The Lee Foundation, NAC R & D Grant, NTU Incentive Scheme Grant, MOE Tier 1 Grant, and Research Grant for Foreign Scholars in Chinese Studies. He was visiting scholar at Harvard University (2016) , Leiden University (2017) , National Taiwan University (2019), and the Centre for Chinese Studies, Taipei (2019) . He was offered "NTU Long Service Award" in Oct 2023, and was awarded "Excellent Paper Prize of the Year 2016" by the journal Modern Chinese Literature Studies (Beijing), in March 2017.

Zhang's research areas include modern and contemporary Chinese literature, Southeast Asian Chinese-language literature, East-West comparative literature, and critical theory. He has solely-authored 6 books, the publishers include Peking University Press, China Social Sciences Press, and World Scientific Publishing, and so forth. Zhang's papers have appeared in local and international journals.

Zhang has been invited to give talks and presentations for a number of academic institutions, e.g. Harvard University, Tsinghua University at Beijing, Wuhan University, Sichuan University, Zhejiang University, Beijing Normal University, Sun Yat-Sen University, Xiamen University, Shandong University, Nankai University, Jinan University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Museum of Modern Chinese Literature, National Tsing Hua University at Hsinchu, National Taiwan University, The Centre for Chinese Studies (Taipei), National Dong Hwa University, The Education University of Hong Kong, National University of Singapore, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (Malaysia) , and so on.

Zhang has media appearance. He got interviewed by Lianhe Zaobao (2016, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022) , Boston No. 1 Chinese Radio Station (2016), Forum for Chinese Literature of the World (2018), Jiangnan (2018) , and Chinese and Western Poetry (2019), etc.