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Graduate
Student
Profiles |
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HANAKO
ASAKURA (Japanese
Literature) |
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Hanako
Asakura received her B.A. from Yale and her M.A. in Asian Studies
from UC Berkeley. She is
off
to
Japan
as
a Fulbright
scholar to pursue her dissertation research
which is entitled Landscapes of the Mind in Meiji Japan.
Her research interests include correspondences in painterly
and
poetic
aesthetics, the uncanny, Meiji literature, and philosophy.
She finds that she is becoming a die-hard (Kunikida)
Doppoist. Otherwise she prefers old things, onomatopoeic sounds,
cartooning, etc. |
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RY
BEVILLE (Japanese Literature) |
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Ry
is interested in modern Japanese poetry, particularly Nakahara
Chuya. He has published two volumes of translations of this
poet's work, including Poems of the Goat (2002) and Poems
of Days Past (2005). He took his M.A. in Spring 2004,
writing his thesis on the Taisho-era poet Tominaga Taro. Other
areas
of interest include comparative literature, translation theory
and practice, kickboxing, slide guitar, and quality beer. Ry
took his B.A. in English and Japanese from the University of
Notre Dame in 1997 (spent 95-96 year at Nanzan University in
Nagoya, Japan), and worked for five years after graduation
in Fukuoka. Ry's translations can be viewed at www.nakaharachuya.com.
Ry is currently a Fulbright fellow at the University of Tokyo,
researching for his dissertation on form in 20th century Japanese
poetry. |
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COREY
BYRNES (Chinese
Literature) |
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Corey
Byrnes received a B.A. from Brown University and an M.Phil in Oriental Studies from the University of Cambridge, where he was a member of Kings College. He keeps his interests as broad as possible, but has always been drawn to late imperial fiction - Jin Ping Mei, and Hong Lou Meng in particular - and medieval poetry. He likes to eat and cook. |
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RACHEL CARDEN (Japanese
Literature) |
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Rachel
is a first year graduate student continuing on at Berkeley after 4.5 years as an undergraduate, and is so far feeling like a 6th year undergrad. Her interests include female authors, particularly those of the Meiji/Taisho period, and more particularly (at least lately) their portrayal of feminism and femininity. She also harbors a now not too secret ambition to explore Japanese fantasy and utopian/dystopian literature in the Post-War period. |
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ADAM
CHANZIT (Chinese
Literature) |
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Adam
Chanzit is a Ph.D. student in the Chinese program. After receiving
his B.A. from Yale with a double major in Literature
and Theater (2003), he spent 2004 researching Daoism in contemporary
China, based at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing
and various remote mountain temples. His academic interests remain wide, ranging from early Chinese
thought to spoken drama. Other activities of note include playwriting
and screenwriting, hiking and canoeing, and pickup foosball matches. |
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ELIZABETH
CHAO (Chinese
Literature) |
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Elizabeth
Chao received
her B.A. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley with an
emphasis on Japanese and Chinese Literature. Since then she has
been
travelling throughout much of Asia attempting to learn a little
about Buddhism in East Asian cultures and literature.
In between her travels
and studies, she works as an oncology nurse at UCSF Medical Center. |
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MICHAEL
CRAIG (Japanese
Literature) |
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Michael Craig is a second-year Ph.D. student and transplanted Chicagoan who doubts he will ever get used to seeing mayonnaise on a cheeseburger and worries daily that establishing California residency has dropped him out of favor with Lincoln's ghost. He is currently working on an M.A. thesis that traces the discursive similarities and often paradoxical temporalities of developmental psychology, emergence theory, internet utopianism, and theorizations of the "multiplanar" cartoon image through a reading of the anime series Paranoia Agent. His hope is that this project will simultaneously account for and reenact the tendency of theoretical/artistic constructions of juvenile delinquency, including Paranoia Agent itself, to lose track of their subject (or at least to diminish its specificity.) Mike's other interests likewise tend to revolve around time/temporality and new media; for example, he is interested in the opposition between narrative time and play time in console Role-Playing Games, and in how that opposition is both reinforced and elided by such tropes as bonus dungeons and non-speaking or itinerant heroes. Favorite hobbies include gambling, disappearing, and otaku-style consumerism. |
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AILEEN
CRUZ (Japanese Literature) |
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Aileen
Cruz is a Ph.D candidate in Japanese literature. She received
a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Wellesley College
with an emphasis on Latin American and Japanese literature. Currently
she is interested in representations of burakumin in modern Japanese
literature as it relates to colonialism and the representation
of the Other. She is also interested in issues of gender and
sexuality in Japanese women's fiction. Outside of school, Aileen
enjoys (attempting) cooking for her eternally hungry husband,
Jorge. |
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TIEZHU
DONG (Chinese Literature) |
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Dong
Tiezhu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Chinese program. He received
his M.A. degree from Peking University,
China. While there, he focused on the relationship between early
Chinese myth and Taoism, paticuarly the Zhuangzi. Now he mainly
focuses on early Chinese thought and literature from Pre-Qin
to the Han dynasty. |
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MATTHEW
FARGO (Japanese Literature) |
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Matthew
Fargo is a third year student in Japanese Literature. He likes
Showa literature and "Buraiha" authors
in particular. He also enjoys composing music and fiction and
sandwiches. |
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PIOTR
GIBAS (Chinese
Literature) |
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Piotr
Gibas is
a native of Poland and received his M.A. in Chinese language
and literature from Warsaw University, a school to whose great
teachers he is deeply indebted and attached. However, in 1995-96
he spent a year in Beijing, after which he denied his Polish
past and started considering China his true homeland. Currently,
Piotr is a Ph.D. candidate in the Chinese program at Berkeley.
He is interested in religion and is working on the thought and
spirituality of early
China. He has always been fascinated by the dark yin side of
human spirituality, especially magic, divination, sacrifice,
ecstasy
and feminine cults. During the coming Fall semester, he will
be studying early Chinese manuscripts at Beijing University.
He is also interested in modern history, literature and culture
of the Far East, Central and South-East Asia. His other passions
include travelling and trekking, cooking, Russian and Spanish.
He does not like Mondays and flying. He thinks Sundays are depressing
and his favorite color is yellow. He is a slave of pastries,
sweets, cakes and Chinese cuisine. |
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BARRETT
J. HEUSCH (Japanese Literature) |
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Barrett is a doctoral student specializing in
pre-modern Japanese literature. After receiving his B.A. in Japanese
from Pomona College he spent several years teaching in Japan
and traveling throughout Asia and Central Europe. Possibly because
of this, one of his main research interests is travel literature;
others include medieval poetry, especially waka, and exile. His
M.A. thesis was a study and translation of Michiyukiburi, a travel
diary written in 1371 by Imagawa Ryoshun. His dissertation will
continue his work on Ryoshun. |
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MENGHSIN
CINDY HORNG (Chinese
Literature) |
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Cindy
was born in Taiwan, grew up mostly in Michigan, and received
her B.A. from the University of Michigan before
moving back to Taipei for three years. In this dynamic environment,
she nurtured her love for Chinese and Taiwanese
film
and musical oldies, which she hopes to explore
further at Berkeley. She is especially interested in the relationship
between
Nationalist (and nationalistic) cultural policies and popular
art, including issues of government sponsorship and censorship,
dialect-based mass media, and the intertextual pathways connecting literature,
music, and film. For fun and relaxation, she enjoys
exploring her new home in the Bay Area with her partner
and her Shiba
Inu. |
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HARRISON
HUANG (Chinese
Literature) |
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Harrison Huang is a doctoral candidate in classical Chinese
literature who received his B.A. studying continental philosophy
at the University of Chicago, where he was initially drawn
to ideas about ethics in early Chinese thought, such as the
notion of virtue as a kind of virtuosity. His master's thesis
focused on the role of desire in Mencius' notion of self-cultivation,
with special attention given to court performance roles, prompts
for pleasure and rhetorical modes in Mencius' dialogues with
rulers. He currently works on Six Dynasties poetry and hermeneutics,
thinking through issues like the uses of allusion in landscape
poetry. For fun, he has a website under construction on the
Classic of Poetry (http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hh/odes/)
that collates Han and Song dynasty commentaries. |
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DAVID HUMPHREY (Japanese
Literature) |
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David Humphrey is a first year graduate student in Japanese literature and culture. His current interest is in the cognitive construction of social spaces such as the nation through discourses and texts, particularly in the post-war period. |
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JANICE
S. KANEMITSU (Japanese Literature) |
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Janice
received her B.A. in Dance as a Performing Art from UC Santa Barbara and, after an interlude in Japan, began graduate studies at UC Berkeley in 2000. Receiving her M.A. in Asian Studies in 2002, her thesis explored the position of Keichû’s Man’yô daishôki within the commentarial tradition of Man’yôshû studies. Since spending the 2005-2006 year in Kansai as a Fulbright Graduate Research Fellow, she has been writing her dissertation titled “Extraordinary Exemplars in the Period Pieces of Chikamatsu Monzaemon.” Her main research interests include all genres of performed narratives, ranging from the recitation of military tales to utazaimon; performance theory; historicity and topicality in period pieces (jidaimono) and historical fiction; representations of exemplary conduct in print and on stage; and transgender identities. |
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XIAO
LIU (Chinese
Literature) |
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Xiao
Liu is a first-year Ph.D. student in Chinese literature. She
received her M.A. in comparative literature from Tsinghua University
in Beijing, and wrote her thesis on children’s literature
in the Republican Era, examining the construction of modern
subject. She is interested in both historical and theoretical
explorations
of “modernity” in modern Chinese literature and
culture, particularly in how people experience such “modernity/modernities” under
the rapid and dramatic changes since the 20th century. |
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PATRICK LUHAN (Japanese
Literature) |
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Patrick received his B.A. in Mathematics and Japanese Literature from Columbia in 2004 at which point he worked in investment banking, helped manage a Japanese art gallery, and wrote for Harper's Magazine before continuing as an M.A. student of Japanese Literature at Columbia. For his 2006 M.A. thesis, Patrick explored the didactic character of the prodigal son in popular literature from the 1780s and translated two satirical picture books. Currently, he is delving further into the world of kabuki and its influence on conceptions of revenge, love, economy and family in early modern literature as a doctoral candidate at Berkeley. Writ large, Patrick's interests include the nineteenth century, the relation between history and narrative, the boundaries of image and text, and the reception of French literature in Japan |
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JEANNETTE PEI-SAN NG (Chinese
Literature) |
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Jeannette received her B.A. in English literature from Oxford, United Kingdom. After a few years working in journalism and translation, in her native Singapore and in China and Japan, she soon returned to academia. Her initial forays into research yielded a masters thesis on issues of cultural identity in Singaporean literature, and a masters degree in Chinese literature from San Francisco State University. While her main research interests are in modern and late imperial China, she is also interested in exploring theories of music and performance, sonic and oral cultures, the idiom of the vernacular, the formation of cultural and aesthetic identities, and Sinophone literary translation. |
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PATRICK
NOONAN (Japanese
Literature) |
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Patrick
Noonan received his B.A. in Modern Literary Studies with an emphasis
in Japanese literature from U.C. Santa Cruz. During
his term at Santa Cruz, Patrick studied Irish literature and
film at Trinity College, Dublin, and Japanese language and literature
in Japan at International Christian University. Currently, he
is exploring representations of crowds in Meiji and Taisho literature
and film. Other interests include critical theory, Marxism, Ireland,
and, most recently, German language. |
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JOSHUA
PETITTO (Japanese
Literature) |
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Josh
Petitto received his B.S. from Birmingham-Southern College
in physics, and then sought refuge
in the world of literature when he realized he was mathematically
inept. He was able to successfully escape his former identity
at the University of Hawaii, where he received his M.A. in
Japanese literature. His
thesis there focused on concepts of space and place in the
fiction of Nakagami Kenji, a theoretical approach he would
like to continue
to work on as a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley. |
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JAMI
PROCTOR-XU (Chinese Literature) |
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Jami Proctor-Xu is a Ph.D. student in Chinese
Literature with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
Having advanced to candidacy in 2002, she is currently working
on her dissertation on cultural ruins in contemporary China.
Her research interests include ruins, urban space in China, feminist
theory, and contemporary Chinese poetry. |
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ZELIDETH
RIVAS (Japanese
Literature) |
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Zelideth
Rivas is a Ph.D. candidate in Japanese who
is currently working
towards orals. She received her B.A. from Wellesley College
in Japanese and completed a M.A. thesis
titled "Representing
the Subaltern: Ishikawa Tatsuzo and Okamatsu
Kazuo's Views of the Transnational Japanese-Brazilians" at
UC Berkeley. Her dissertation "Jun-nisei
Literature in Brazil: Conceptions of Memory,
Adaptation, and Victimization" will examine the
production and consumption of the fantasy
of immigration expressed in the literature
surrounding the largest Japanese diaspora. She is currently
conducting research
in Japan and Brazil through a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation
Research Abroad Fellowship. |
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PAUL
ROQUET (Japanese
Literature) |
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Paul
Roquet is pursuing a degree in Japanese literature, with
a designated emphasis in Film Studies. He received his B.A.
from Pomona College with a degree in Asian Studies and Media
Studies, and spent the following year on a Thomas J. Watson
Fellowship studying soundscapes and acoustic ecology. His senior
thesis, later expanded into a manuscript, was a Deleuze-inspired
take on butoh dance entitled Towards the Bowels of the
Earth: Butoh Writhing in Perspective. He is currently working on a
project concerning the commodification of affect in the late-20th
century, particularly with regards to promises of relaxation
and stress-relief.. |
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ORNA
SHAUGHNESSY (Japanese
Literature) |
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Orna
Shaughnessy spent four years in Kyoto, Japan, before coming
to graduate school at UC Berkeley to study modern Japanese
literature.
Her M.A. Thesis, titled “A Literature of Commitment: the
Aesthetics of Japanese Proletariat Fiction in 1927,” examines
the various politically inflected literary aesthetics of four
writers of the 1920s. She is currently beginning a project
that considers the role of travel, specifically walking, in
long prose
narratives of the Meiji period, from the gesaku-influenced
foot travelers of Kanagaki Robun to the urban strollers of
Natsume
Soseki. |
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XIAOJING
SUN (Chinese
Literature) |
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Xiaojing
Sun is a Ph.D. candidate in Chinese literature. She received
her M.A. in classical Chinese literature from Beijing
University in 2001, and is continuing her graduate studies at
UC Berkeley. Her research focus is on the performance texts in
Chinese literature of the third through nineteenth centuries,
with special interests in the function of performance/music within
the text/narrative, and the use of linguistic approaches,
especially those based on reconstructed phonology in different
dialects to investigate these performance texts. |
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IAN
TULLIS (Japanese
Literature) |
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Ian
Tullis studied biology for a living and premodern Japanese
literature as a hobby before realizing that
he had his wires crossed. He is currently interested
in Edo popular literature and scientific thought, representations
of nature in Chinese and Japanese poetry, monstrous folktales,
and everything else that he missed while he was training to become
a scientist. In his first year of graduate school, he will
continue to find the time to write and solve
puzzles, lift weights, and relieve passersby of their swords. |
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PAULI
WAI (Chinese
Literature) |
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Pauli
Wai is a second-year graduate student interested in Ming-Qing
fiction by way of *Dream of Red Chamber*. But
lately, she is getting her hands on
canonical texts like the Five Classics and Four Books, just to
start from the basics. She hopes this should help
her better understand traditional
commentary and the literary/philosophical historical contexts
around virtually any pre-modern text. |
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DUN
WANG (Chinese
Literature) |
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Dun
Wang is a Ph.D. candidate in Chinese literature. He is a Beijinger— born
and raised in Beijing, as well as graduated from Beijing University.
Despite this, he has come to UC-Berkeley and is finding
the stay enjoyable and worthwhile. His focus is on the changing
narrative modes from the late 19th to early 20th centuries
in Chinese literature.[BLOG] |
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XIAOQING
WANG (Chinese
Literature) |
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Xiaoqing
Wang is a graduate student in the Chinese Ph.D. program. She
received her B.A. in Chinese literature from Fudan University
in 2002. She is currently writing her Master's thesis about the
ideas of the body in early China, focusing on the perception,
representation and cultivation of the human body. |
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CHRIS
WEINBERGER (Japanese
Literature) |
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Chris
began his work in the Department by learning from Meiji and
Taisho literature: he became addicted to the game of go, took
long meandering
walks through neighboring hillsides, and sat around feeling
a vague anxiety about sitting around. He then took up Japanese
criticism and theory as a means of deferring discussion about
anything in particular. Finally, he hit upon the ultimate means
of avoiding productivity: devising abstracts for vague future
projects. In his most current work he proposes to study
transformations in the way Japanese writers, critics, and scholars
in the modern
(1868-1930s) period formulated the relationship between literature
and ethics. In particular, he says he will argue that critical
writing about literature began to manifest an “ethics of
self-consciousness” that
political and ideological pressure had forced literary writing
itself to abandon. In the, he hopes to produce a kind of genealogy
of the development of “literary theory” in the
early twentieth century. |
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C.
MIKI WHEELER (Japanese Literature) |
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Miki
is a doctoral candidate in classical Japanese literature with
a special interest in the thematic, structural, and topical
associations between historical documents, historical narratives,
and courtier diaries kept by both men and women from the mid-Heian
through the early Kamakura periods.
She treats these concerns in her dissertation, titled “Tamakiwaru,
A Gem-Glistening Spirit: Kengozen and her Early Kamakura Court
Memoir,” in which she also provides an annotated translation
of the text. She recently returned from Tokyo where she studied
primarily with Imazeki Toshiko, under the auspices of the Fulbright-Hays
program. After Tamakiwaru, she anticipates that her
next project will be to translate and annotate Imakagami,
a historical
narrative centering on court activity during the so-called
insei period of the late eleventh through twelfth centuries. |
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ABBIE
(MIYABI) YAMAMATO (Japanese Literature) |
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Abbie
is a doctoral candidate in Japanese literature with a strong
interest in colonial Korean literature. She is a native of
Tsukuba, Japan, where she lived until she was seventeen. She
received her B.A. in comparative literature from Barnard College
in 2001 and received her M.A. from UC Berkeley in 2005. Her
master's thesis was titled “Modern Faces of Kaguyahime:
Figures of Young Women” and compared the figure of the
protagonist Kaguyahime in Taketori monogatari (“The Tale
of the Bamboo Cutter”) to later fiction which featured her.
From 2003-2004 she lived in Seoul, Korea, studying Korean in
preparation for her dissertation research. From 2005-2006 she
spent time at UCLA, and for the year 2007, she is conducting
research in Japan on a Japan Foundation Fellowship. Her main
interests include the influence of colonialism and modernism
on identity formation and transformation as expressed in literary
texts. |
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ANGIE
YUAN (Chinese Literature) |
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Angie
Yuan is a third year Ph.D. student concentrating on
Late Imperial and Modern Chinese Literature. She is interested
in themes of dislocation, urban space and
its relationship to narrative form and translation
practices. She is currently working on some translations of Eileen
Chang's short stories as well as selections of Qing lyric poetry.Angie
also has an MFA in creative writing and recently had poems published in Fence Magazine and the Boston Review. |
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