Jacky Ho Lung Chan 陳昊龍

Thesis title: Reading and Recovering after Public Health Crisis

Supervisor: Professor Sophie Ratcliffe

Research interests: literature and science/medicine; book history; history of reading; literary and aesthetic value; allusion and intertextuality; postcolonial and East Asian literatures

Doctoral research: I investigate the relationship between reading and recovery, as imagined and debated by authors writing in the aftermath of twentieth and twenty-first century public health crises (the combined trauma of World War I and Spanish Influenza pandemic, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the Covid-19 pandemic). My current argument is that that these authors' visions of recuperative reading nuances conventional, biomedical conceptions of the mechanisms and goals of recovery.

My geographical focus is on the UK, and the authors I am researching include: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, H.D., Michael Cunningham, Neil Bartlett, Ali Smith, and Sally Rooney.

Background: Fully funded by the Hong Kong Scholarship for Excellence Scheme, I read my BA in English Language and Literature at St Catherine's College, Oxford, where I subsequently completed a MSt in English (1900-present) as a Ghosh Graduate Scholar. My DPhil research is fully supported by the Oxford-Hong Kong Jockey Club Graduate Scholarship.

As a student-scholar from Hong Kong, I have broader interests in contemporary Hong Kong literature as well as postcolonial criticism and theory.