Feng Lu
About Me
I am a third-year PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. I am also a reader and illustration editor at the Short Fiction Literary Journal.Contact Me
Lu.Feng@warwick.ac.uk
Office Hours
Friday 10-11 - FAB5.31
Twitter: @lufffeng
Thesis Description
My Ph.D. thesis, Fictional Narratives and Rivers: Late Imperial Chinese Literature as World Literature, examines how the late imperial Chinese fictional narratives were shaped by the riverine environments of China of canals, lakes, ponds, rivers, and irrigation channels. Drawing on space studies and literary geography, and incorporating multiple visual materials such as maps and paintings, it examines how rivers functioned as both a bridge and boundary through which the late imperial Chinese writers grappled with drastic social-natural changes of the time in their practice of fictive worldmaking. As the late imperial period was also a time that witnessed intensified global interactions, my thesis aims to provide an alternative framework not only to the current study of Chinese literature that challenges the discourse of Chinese modernity. Engaging with blue humanities, it also seeks to explore a distinct methodology to world literature that is at once rooted in a specific context (namely late imperial China) but addresses issues that go beyond China and equally matter to other parts of the world, namely colonialism and imperialism in relation to gender, race, ethnicity, and knowledge production. In so doing, my thesis offers a local, environmental and historical approach to the study of world literature.
My thesis is supervised by Caitlin Vandertop and co-supervised by Anne Gerritsen.
Research Interests
Literary Geographies, Comparative Early Modernities, Environmental Humanities, Narrative Theories, World Literature
Awards and Scholarships
The Doctoral Fellowship at the Humanities Research Centre at University of Warwick, 2024-2025
The Wolfson Foundation Scholarship, 2021-2024
MA Dissertation Prize, University of Essex, 2021
Academic Excellence Scholarship, University of Essex, 2019-2020
Conference Papers
- June 2024 (upcoming), 'Becoming Queer with Rivers', organised by the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature 2024 Biennial Conference: Behold the Human, hosted by Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
- December 2023, 'An Archipelagic Thinking on China', organised by Global China Research Centre at the University of Exeter.
- July 2023, 'A Cross-Cultural Reading of the Beautiful Frozen Worlds', at London Conference in Critical Thought, hosted by London Metropolitan University.
- May 2023, 'Living in A Frozen World: Reading Water in The Last Days of the World and Bingshan xuehai', at Culture and Global Responsibility: Rethinking Habitually in the Age of the Anthropocene, hosted by the University of Warwick.
Participated workshops
- August 2024, 'Tense and Tender: Ecologies of Care and Vulnerability', organised by Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society, hosted by University of the Philippines Diliman (Upcoming)
Membership
- Association of Southeast Asian Studies
- British Comparative Literature Association
Education
MA Literature, University of Essex
BE Architecture, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University