Professor Bender specializes in traditional performance and performance-connected literature of China, including local Han and ethnic minority cultures. He teaches Chinese and East Asian culture courses, a course on Traditional Performance in Contemporary East Asia, an introduction to ethnic minority writing in China and the borderlands of Asia, and seminars that have included ethnic minority epic, Chinese prosimetric literature, and oral and written ethnic poetry. Bender has published on numerous subjects, including Suzhou professional storytelling (pingtan) and the oral and written literatures of several Chinese minority cultures, such as the Yi, Miao (Hmong), and Daur. His books include Plum and Bamboo: China's Suzhou Chantefable Tradition (University of Illinois Press, 2003), Butterfly Mother: Miao (Hmong) Creation Epics from Guizhou Province, China (Hackett Publishing, 2006), Tiger Traces: Selected Nuosu and Chinese Poetry of Aku Wuwu (OSU Foreign Languages Publishers, 2006), and The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature, edited with Victor Mair (2011).  His most recent books are The Borderlands of Asia: Culture, Place, Poetry, which features poems by 49 poets in North-East India, Myanmar, Southwest China, Inner Mongolia, and Mongolia (Cambria Press, 2017), and The Nuosu Book of Origins: A Creation Epic from Southwest China (University of Washington Press, 2019), with Aku Wuwu and Jjivo Zopqu. Representative articles are "Landscapes and Life-Forms in Cosmographic Epics from Southwest China," published in Chinese Literature Today (Volume 5, Number 2, 2016), and “Co-creations, Master Texts, and Monuments: Long Narrative Poems of Ethnic Minority Groups in China.” Chinoperl: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 38:65-90, 2019). Other projects include an annotated translation of a Yi ritual text from Southwest China, eco-poetry in Eastern Asia, and updating EALL 1231 East Asian Humanities course content in Pressbook format.