Dr Aurelia Dee Wu is currently an Early Career Fellow with the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS), University of Warwick where she received her Ph.D. degree in English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick in February 2020.

Her PhD project — The Cultural Legacy of Oscar Wilde in Modern China and Beyond (1909 –2019) — studies British writer/trendsetter Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)’s cultural impact in fashion, youth culture, and online LGBTQ+ activism in contemporary Mainland China as well as Japan and South Korea. It juxtaposes British literature with material culture, gender studies, and digital humanities. Her work also engages with big data analysis, behaviour economics, and even luxury marketing, which explores reasons behind the Chinese millennial’ Anglophilia in consuming British cultural and luxury products that encapsulated the idealised “Britishness”.

Her current interest lies in the fin de siècle Aestheticism's and Decadence's afterlife in the fashion industry. Her talk at the TEDxWarwick Student Salon (2018) has attracted attention from Alexander McQueen, and the Shanghai-based fashion house Sand River. Wu is ambitious to develop cross-over cooperation between C19 British literature and modern fashion design in both academia and industry.

Her most recent published article on Wilde's representation in the Chinese fashion market was selected by Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History.

Further Research Interests:

• Nineteenth-century English literature, especially Aestheticism and Decadence
• Gender and sexuality (LBGTQ+)
• Literature study in line with big data analysis
• Dandyism, fashion, and masculinity study
• Literature and visual culture
• Literature and material culture
• Popular, fan and folk cultures
• Internet culture and society
• Sociology of literature and culture

Research Interest in terms of (Historical) Geographical Areas:

• British Empire and the East India Company
• Late Qing (1840–1912), Republican China (1912–1949), Mainland China
• Meiji Japan (1868–1912), Joseon (1871–1897)
• 19th-century Siam and Khmer
• 19th-century Russian Empire

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