Jacky Ho Lung Chan 陳昊龍

Thesis title: Reading and Recovering: Modernist and Contemporary Negotiations of Literature's Curative Value

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 fully supported by the Oxford-Hong Kong Jockey Club Graduate Scholarship.

Doctoral research: I investigate how readers and writers engage with, test, and negotiate the idea that reading is curative, using case studies from two transhistorically comparable global pandemics (the 1918-19 Spanish Influenza and Covid-19) which throw these issues into especially sharp relief. 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

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