Contemporary Literature in English
I write about modern and contemporary literature in English. My interest has often been drawn to literature that is also life writing.
Recently I have focused on how literature adapts to changing media contexts, infrastructures, and ecosystems. Platform has become my keyword. Previously I focused on surveillance; my first phase of research was about security.
Publications
Talks
Memory, Perception, and Narrative in English-Language Autofiction
Conference presentation, DH2026, Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, Daejeon, South Korea
Upcoming presentation.
Does Autofiction in English Exist? Generic and Narrative Measures
Conference presentation, Conference on Computational Literary Studies, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
Autofiction in English: Generic and Narrative Characteristics
Conference presentation, Computational Cultural Science Workshop, École national des chartres, Paris, France
Recent Quantitative Approaches to Literary Studies
Conference presentation, English Literature and Language Cluster, Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
The Event of Autofiction in English
Conference presentation, Hong Kong Association of Digital Humanities Conference, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Small Language Models: Contemporary Literature and the Style Transfer Task
Keynote, Literary Studies Symposium, Hong Kong Shue Yan University, Hong Kong
What is an Antiracist Ontology?
Invited talk, English Department Seminar, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong
Miranda July's Social Medium
Invited talk, Media Studies Lecture, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Friendly Strangers and Strange Friends: Writing Relationality Now
Invited talk, Department of English, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
Friendly Strangers and Strange Friends: Writing Relationality Now
Invited talk, School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA
The Ethics of Alterity and The Ethics of Care
Conference presentation, Hong Kong 2023 Humanities Conference on Comparative Cultures of Care, EdUHK, Hong Kong
Xi Xi and the Value Theory of Labor
Invited talk, HKBU English Department Seminar Series, Hong Kong
Surveillance in Contemporary American Autofiction
Invited talk, City University of Hong Kong English Department Seminar Series, Hong Kong
Internet Censorship and State Surveillance Systems
Public talk, A Cha Discussion, Hong Kong
We are Data! Twee Surveillance in Miranda July and Sheila Heti
Conference presentation, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, Hong Kong
Surveillance, Democracy, and American Autofiction
Keynote, Heterotopic Junctions Postgraduate Conference, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong
Inverting Infrastructure in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy
Conference presentation, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, New Orleans, LA, USA
Reading Claudia Rankine Empathetically
Conference presentation, Modernism and Empathy, Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Data Exhaust: Tao Lin's Quotation Marks and Surveillance Capitalism
Conference presentation, Modern Language Association Convention, New York, NY, USA
Memoir against Metafiction: David Foster Wallace and the Internal Revenue Service
Conference presentation, American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, Utrecht, Netherlands
Post-Paranoid David Foster Wallace
Conference presentation, Surveillance, Form, Affect, Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness: Surveillance, Algorithms, and the Forms of Contemporary American Fiction
Conference presentation, Literary Form and Reform, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
Surveillance and Transparency in Claudia Rankine's American Lyric
Conference presentation, Joint Conference of the Irish and British Associations for American Studies, Belfast, UK
Surveilling Citizens: Claudia Rankine, from the First to the Second Person
Conference presentation, American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, Boston, MA, USA
Surveilling Citizens: Claudia Rankine, from the First to the Second Person
Invited talk, English Department, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong
Monuments to Information: Kenneth Goldsmith and Maya Lin
Conference presentation, Between Monumentalism and Miniaturization, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Hospitality, Hong Kong, and the Culture of Total Information Awareness
Invited talk, English Department, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Technooriental Hong Kong, from William Gibson to Edward Snowden
Conference presentation, International Conference on the History of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Shue Yan University, Hong Kong
Hospitality and Dataveillance
Conference presentation, American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, Seattle, WA, USA
Surveillance and Privacy in U.S. Law and Literature
Invited talk, Law and Literature Colloquium, City University of Hong Kong Law School, Hong Kong
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge's Chinese Spaces
Conference presentation, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, Shanghai, China
Smoking on the Streets of New York: Art Spiegelman as Rooted Cosmopolitan
Conference presentation, Modern Language Association Conference, Chicago, IL, USA
Rooted Cosmopolitan: Art Spiegelman in New York, circa 9/11/01
Invited talk, English Department, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
U.S. Sovereignty and International Law in Cormac McCarthy
Conference presentation, American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, Toronto, Canada
Art, the State, and Ectoplasm: Arthur Miller's The Archbishop's Ceiling
Conference presentation, American Literature Association Conference, San Francisco, CA, USA
Author or Authoritarian? Nabokov's Realities and Cold War Confessional Discourse
Conference presentation, Modern Language Association Conference, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Crisis of Confidence: Richard Nixon and the Male Feminist
Conference presentation, (Dis)-junctions Graduate Conference, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA
Teaching
English Literature and Data Analytics
Graduate, Education University of Hong Kong
Computational and quantitative methods applied to the study of English literature.
Readings in New Literatures in English
Undergraduate, Education University of Hong Kong
Twenty-first literature in English with a global scope. Experiments with a flipped classroom.
Literature in Context 2: 1914-2000
Undergraduate, Education University of Hong Kong
Literature and war; literature and civil rights; literature and immigration.
Literature in Context 1: 1789-1914
Undergraduate, Education University of Hong Kong
Romantic, Victorian, Modern.
Approaching English Literature
Undergraduate, Education University of Hong Kong
Forms, genres, terminology. Writing about literature as a mode of reading it.