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 roles reading played in individual and social recovery from twentieth and twenty-first century public health crises, namely: the combined trauma of World War I and Spanish Influenza pandemic, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the Covid-19 pandemic. I look at both literary depictions and real-life historical examples of readers and their reading practices, and I argue that recuperative reading in the aftermath of public health crisis nuances conventional, biomedical ideas regarding the mechanisms 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.