Emily Chen (USA)

Originally from the Bay Area, California, I hold a BA with honours in comparative literature and political economy from Williams College. My senior thesis, "All the sense of real": Girls at Play in Natural Spaces and Imagined Places explored the imaginative potential of nature in girlhood literature as liberated or curbed by colonial positionalities through psychoanalytic lenses and was funded by the Roche and Gomez Student Research Fellowship. This project comprised analyses of seminal texts Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery and Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid, as well as an auto-fictional chapter charting and contextualizing my own childhood. 

I am always interested in delving into and dovetailing the fields of children's literature, diasporic and postcolonial literatures, geo-criticism, archival science, and developmental and trauma-informed psychoanalysis. I also enjoy playing with and troubling the boundary between academic and creative work, extending the ambit of either discipline into the other, and focusing the significance of scholastic discovery on its real-world applicability. My current research engages with children's contrasting experiences of space and place in the nominal homeland and in diaspora, as well as the influence postcolonial cultural structures bear on these sensed relationships.