I studied World literatures and cultures at Tsinghua University (Beijing) for my BA and also studied at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) as a visiting student for one year. While enjoying my studies in various disciplines from anthropology to art history and reading literatures in diverse national and regional contexts, I find modernism in general appeals to me most. Particularly, I’m interested in issues like the relationship between language and media in modernists’ works, temporality and the (dis)function of memory in the modern age, and travel, migration, and diaspora in the formation of modernisms. For my undergraduate thesis, I wrote on Elizabeth Bishop’s travel poems, examining the relationship between the self and others formed and reformed in the process of travel. These interests and experiences bring me to the MSt course in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation at Oxford, where I plan to delve into English and Chinese literatures and arts. For my masters thesis, I will focus on translation and translingual/transcultural phenomena in English and Chinese modernist literature. I hope the year in Oxford will enrich my understanding of the meaning of “comparative” both in literature and in real life.
Apart from writing serious academic papers, I also enjoy writing non-fictional essays and love films, art museums, and bookstores. I participated a lot in the mainland China-Taiwan exchange and helped to hold public lectures, reading and film groups at Tsinghua to promote mutual understandings. I also worked for a contemporary art museum based in Beijing, assisting them in organising public events and translating and editing art historical articles.
I am tremendously grateful to the Ertegun Scholarship for their generous support and I am very much looking forward to my life and study in the Ertegun community.