I specialize in Global Anglophone literature and culture from the 19th century to today. I place British Romantic and Victorian literature in conversation with literatures from the Global South (especially the Caribbean, South Asia, and East Asia), with special focus on a literary theme and political concept called decadence. My work has received awards and honors from the British Association for Decadence Studies (BADS) and the Northeast Victorian Studies Associaton (NVSA).
I have secondary interests in the digital humanities. I also concentrated on issues about translation and untranslatibility at the Harvard Institute for World Literature. Alongside English and Cantonese, I continue to deepen my fluency in Mandarin and French (my third and fourth languages). A full CV is available upon request.
Book Project
My first book project is about decadence in the Anglophone and multilingual literatures of the long ninteenth and twentieth centuries. It has two intertwined aims. The first is to unearth a new literary history about decadent writing, anchored around two key events in the long nineteenth century: the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and the British colonization of Hong Kong (1842-1997). The second is to examine how enslaved and colonized writers and their descendants in this period created their own versions of artistic and literary decadence within and against the era's imperialist oppressions, while also negotiating with the complex relationship that decadence has to conservatism. The project coins the term "Duvalian decadence" to describe their work, after nineteenth-century French decadent poet Charles Baudelaire's Haitian lover, Jeanne Duval.
Peer-Reviewed Literary Criticism
2026 (forthcoming)
"Fashioning Frames: W.E.B. Du Bois and Global "Victorian" Poetry." Victorian Poetry. *Awarded the Honorable Mention from the 2024 Northeast Victorian Studies Expanding the Field Essay Prize. (Solicited, in-progress.)
"The Global Neo-Decadent Movement in Literature and the Hysterical Sublime of Late Capitalism." Humanities. (Solicited for special issue on uses and misuses of fin de siècle decadence, submitted July 2025, under review)
2025
"Decadence Today: Volutes, Unfurling Flowers, and Decolonial Excesses in Shola von Reinhold's LOTE and Thuy On's Decadence." Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 73.1., 91-105. 2025. (Solicited for special issue on decadent literature across time.)
"Race and Decadence: Charles Baudelaire, Jeanne Duval, A.C. Swinburne, and Afro-Asian Ornamentalism in the Global Nineteenth Century." Victorian Studies. 66.3. 466-478. 2025. (Solicited for North American Victorian Studies Association's annual conference special issue.)
2021
"Symbolism, Empire, and the Dance: On Sarojini Naidu's "Eastern Dancers" and Arthur Symons's "Javanese Dancers." Volupté: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies. 4.2. 157-71. *Awarded the 2021 British Association for Decadence Studies Postgraduate Essay Prize.
Select Awards, Grants, Fellowships, etc
Predoctoral-Postdoctoral Fellowship, Jefferson Scholars Foundation, University of Virginia (2023-2025)
Northeast Victorian Studies Association's Expanding the Field Essay Prize, Honorable Mention (2024)
Graduate Global Research Grant, The Center for Global Inquiry + Innovation, University of Virginia (2022)
Comparative, World, Global: A Book Workshop Series Fellowship, Asian Cosmopolitanisms Lab, the Institute of Humanities and Global Cultures (IHGC), University of Virginia (2021)
British Association of Decadence Studies Postgraduate Essay Prize (2021)
Buckner W. Clay Research Grant in the Humanities, IHGC, University of Virginia (2021)
Graduate Fellowship, Jefferson Scholars Foundation, University of Virginia (2020-2022)
Global South Lab Dissertation Proposal Fellowship, Institute of Humanities and Global Cultures (IHGC), University of Virginia (2020)
Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Research Award, University of Virginia (2020)
Dean’s Graduate Research Development Fund Award, University of Virginia (2018)
Millicent Bell Prize, Department of English, New York University (2017)