Jacky Ho Lung Chan 陳昊龍

Thesis title: Reading and Recovering after Public Health Crisis

Supervisor: Professor Sophie Ratcliffe

Doctoral research: What is the relationship between reading and recovering? How have writers and readers conceived of, tested, and negotiated reading's curative value? How is reading imagined as recuperative for both the individual and social/national bodymind? I investigate these questions by looking at literary and historical depictions of reading that have come out of two transhistorically comparable health crises: the combined trauma of World War I and Spanish Flu in the twentieth century, and the Covid-19 pandemic in the twenty-first. My geographical focus is on the UK. Authors under consideration include Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, H.D., Michael Cunningham, Ali Smith, and Sally Rooney.

Research interests: the uses and value of art and literature; the medical humanities; poetic and novel forms; life writing; literary influence and intertextuality; book history; the history of reading; transhistoricity and questions of literary periodisation

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.