Han Au Chua
Thesis Title: Crossovers: The Literature of the British Colonial Administration
Supervisors: Professors Rebecca Beasley and Elleke Boehmer
Han Au's DPhil research is on the crossovers between the methods of colonial administration and literary production from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries during the British Empire. His thesis develops a new approach of reading colonial texts that is attuned to the anthropological, ethnographic, historical, and sociopolitical values and challenges of writing about race and culture in Asia. He also teaches at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
Han Au's doctoral studies is supported by the HASS International PhD Scholarship (co-funded by Singapore's Ministry of Education and Nanyang Technological University). His work has been funded by research grants from the British Association for Modernist Studies, Exeter College, Oxford's English Faculty, and Nanyang Technological University. He has published in Leonardo, Prose Studies, Textual Practice, The Modernist Review, and Woolf Studies Annual. Han Au holds an MSt in English (Distinction) from the University of Oxford, where he topped his cohort, and a BA in English Literature (Honours with Highest Distinction) from the National University of Singapore.
Articles in peer-reviewed journals:
- 'The Letters between Virginia Woolf and Ling Shuhua', Woolf Studies Annual [forthcoming]
- 'Revisiting Pascale Casanova's world literary space', Textual Practice 40.6 (2026), pp. 796-812.
- 'New Ways of Reading Drones in Art: Drones as Existential Technologies', Leonardo 58.1 (2025), pp. 72—78.
- 'We Misunderstood Them: The Correspondence between Virginia Woolf and Ling Shuhua', Woolf Studies Annual 30.2 (2024), pp. 31—52.
- 'Rethinking the biofiction', Prose Studies 43.3 (2022), pp. 213—31.
Book reviews:
