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). The current critical consensus is that reading aids recovery by facilitating either readerly escapism or readerly identification; my thesis questions and nuances these paradigms, and curates a more affectively complex literary history of recuperative reading.
I mainly research authors from the UK; so far, my case studies include Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, Michael Cunningham, Neil Bartlett, Thom Gunn, 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.
