Jacky Ho Lung Chan 陳昊龍

Thesis title: Reading, Writing, and Recovering in Pandemic's Wake: Modernist and Contemporary Negotiations of Literature as Cure

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 Oxford-Hong Kong Jockey Club Graduate Scholarship.

My research interests include the uses and value of art and literature, the medical humanities, poetic and novel forms, life writing, literary influence and intertextuality, book history, and the history of reading, especially in the context of modernist and contemporary anglophone literature. My doctoral research looks at how, catalysed by two comparable global pandemics (the 1918-19 Spanish Influenza and Covid-19), readers and writers engaged with, tested, and negotiated the idea that literature is curative. 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.

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