Contact Me

Lu.Feng@warwick.ac.uk

Office Hours

Friday 10-11 - FAB5.31

Twitter: @lufffeng

Thesis Description

My PhD thesis is entitled ‘Riverine Worlding: Late Imperial Chinese Literature as World Literature.’ It explores the multifaceted role of rivers in Chinese literature from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, drawing on cultural geography, postcolonial studies, world literature, global history, and ecocriticism. It demonstrates how the expansive river-waterway system of late imperial China functioned as quintessential cultural infrastructure, profoundly shaping knowledge production and literary worldviews in ways that persisted into the modern era. It reveals how rivers served not merely as settings, but as organising principles and philosophies for China’s literary worldview.

My thesis is supervised by Caitlin Vandertop and co-supervised by Anne Gerritsen.

Research Interests

Cultural Geography, Comparative Early Modernities, Environmental Humanities, Global History, 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

Academic Excellence Scholarship, University of Essex, 2019-2020

Conference Papers

- June 2024, '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.

Other Research Activities

- Co-organised the conference 'After Postcolonialism: Global Theory, Local Transformations' in March 2025

- Co-curated the exhibition 'Transforming: Here and Now' in January 2025

- Participated in the summer school 'Tense and Tender: Ecologies of Care and Vulnerability' in August 2024, organised by Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society, hosted by University of the Philippines Diliman

Membership

- Association of Southeast Asian Studies

- British Comparative Literature Association

Education

MA Literature (Distinction), University of Essex

BE Architecture (2:1), Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University