Jacky Ho Lung Chan 陳昊龍

Thesis title: Reading and Narrativising Viral Threat in Times of Pandemic: Spanish Flu, Covid-19, and the Value of Narrative

Supervisor: Professor Sophie Ratcliffe

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 generously supported by the Hong Kong Jockey Club Graduate Scholarship.

My research interests include the uses and value of art and literature, literature and science, the medical humanities, poetic and novel forms, life writing, and the history of reading, especially in the context of modernist and contemporary anglophone literature. My DPhil focusses on narratives and reading experiences that engage with viral threat in the context of two comparable global pandemics, the Spanish Influenza (1918-19) and Covid-19 (2020-2023). It aims to ask what crucial work literature is capable of doing in times of medical crisis, beyond simplistic and sentimentalised notions of reading as curative or narratives as producing experiential forms of mediopathological knowledge.

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