Emily Chen (USA)

Originally from the Bay Area, California, I completed the MSt World Literatures in English in 2023. Prior to that, I graduated from Williams College with honours in comparative literature and political economy. My undergraduate dissertation 'All the sense of real': Girls at play in natural spaces and imagined places explored nature in girlhood literature as marked by colonial positionalities and D.W. Winnicott's psychoanalytic theories of imagination and play. 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 contextualising my own childhood. I'm grateful to the Roche and Gomez Student Research Fellowship for funding this research. 

My master's coursework centred minority studies and children's literature, including papers on children's race consciousness and reception studies, scientific feminism in 20th-century American poetry, and geo-critical analyses of Asian American abjection. My dissertation Variations on a theme: Copying, mutation, and transfiguration in Asian American post-memorial literature surveyed themes and techniques of copying in the novels Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien and Bestiary by K-Ming Chang. To build my critical framework, I drew from and expanded literary traditions developed by theorists including Lisa Lowe, Anne Anlin Cheng, Karen Shimakawa, and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, among others. 

My ongoing research areas include ethnic studies, diasporic literature, formalist studies, and affect/emotion—specifically, the failure of closure in ethnic/diasporic literatures. My interest in ethnic and diaspora studies is inseparable from my understanding of transnational Anglophone and postcolonial issues, which informs how I read diasporic texts produced on a substrate of layered imperial conditions. To bridge academic analysis and real-world output, alongside conducting research, I am an editor and creative writer. Since 2016, I have worked on Sine Theta Magazine, a quarterly print creative arts publication by and for the Sino diaspora, where I serve as senior editor. My young adult and adult novel manuscripts-in-progress have been shortlisted for the Peters Fraster + Dunlop Queer Fiction prize.

I remain invested in promoting access to and pedagogical incorporation of children's literature, and I continue to volunteer with English-language literacy programs. Since graduating from Oxford, I have been working in professional services based out of Greater Boston, Massachusetts.