Julia Chan

Julia Chan is Assistant Professor of English at Lingnan University. Born and raised in Hong Kong, she holds a BA and an MPhil in English from the University of Hong Kong and received her PhD in English Language and Literature from Yale University. Her research explores the intersection of modernist literatures in British, Chinese, and Russian contexts, with an emphasis on the relationship between radical socialist and feminist politics and literary experimentation. Her work has appeared in journals such as Modernist Cultures, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, and boundary 2.

She is currently working on her first book, New Worlds for Old: Modernism, Utopia, and Socialism Beyond the Nation, which charts a new literary history of a “left modernism” by investigating the impact of Soviet internationalism as a cultural system in competition with European empires. In contrast to traditional left-wing criticism, this monograph argues that modernist stylistic features, such as fragmentation and montage, do not always mean a retreat into the private realm of individuals’ subjective experience. Rather, they serve the function of shaping new visions of a better, more equitable future.

Chan’s second project turns to transnational feminist studies, tracking an alternative feminist genealogy that developed in tandem with the rise of Red China in the mid-twentieth century. By taking a materialist approach to the production and circulation of Chinese Anglophone women’s writing in a global cultural marketplace suffused with Cold War hostilities, this project also revisits and challenges extant theories of world literature. An article based on this work, “Realism in the Global Age of Modernisms,” is forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms.

• PhD (Yale)
• MPhil (HKU)
• BA (HKU)

• Visiting Scholar, Department of English, Lingnan University (2021-2023)

• Instructor in Academic and Creative Writing, Department of English (2019-2020)

• Teaching Fellow, Department of English, Yale University (2014-2019)

• Lecturer (MA program), Department of English, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (2010-2012)

• Lecturer, Department of English, Lingnan University (2009-2012)

• Lecturer (associate degree program), College of International Education, Hong Kong Baptist University (2009-2012)

• World Literature & Global Modernisms
• Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
• The Long Twentieth Century
• Genre Theory & Genre Fiction
• Literature and Revolution

• ENG2107 Literary Analysis II: Poetry and Drama
• ENG3204 Contemporary Literature in English: Prose Fiction
• ENG3399H Transnational Feminist and Women’s Writings
• ENG3384 The Language of Literature
• ENG4301 Final Year Project supervision

• "Realism in the Global Age of Modernisms.” The Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms. Edited by Margarita Vaysman and Katherine Bowers. Forthcoming.

• "Shangri-La on the Popular Front: ‘China’, the Global Left, and Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War.” Modernist Cultures 17, no. 3-4 (Nov 2022), pp. 297-318. https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/mod.2022.0376

• "Early Soviet Science Fiction and the Unevenness of Modernism: An Aerial View.” Modernism/modernity Print Plus 6, no. 3 (Mar 2022). https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0230

• "The Brave New World of Birth Control: Women’s Travels in Soviet Russia and Naomi Mitchison’s We Have Been Warned.” Journal of Modern Literature 42, no.2 (Winter 2019), pp. 38-56. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/721252

• "Dead Fire Rekindled” (English translation of Wang Hui’s Chinese article), boundary 2 24, no. 3 (2007), pp. 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-2007-011

• “Eileen Chang as “Global Modernist” and the Politics of World Literature,” Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Nov 2023

• “Modernist Utopianism, Precarity, and Mutual Care,” Modernist Studies Association Conference, Brooklyn, USA, Oct 2023

• “Roundtable: Teaching English in a Combined and Uneven University World System,” Department of English, Yale University, Oct 2023

• “Petrus Liu’s Queer Marxism in Two Chinas” Left Literary Studies Working Group, Yale University, January 2020

• “The Brave New Worlds of Birth Control” NeMLA Conference, Pittsburgh, April 2018

• “Sham Revolutionaries and their Veritable Utopias,” Department of English, Yale University, May 2017

• “Joseph Conrad’s Utopian Monsters,” Utopian Studies Society Conference, Petersburg, FL, Oct 2016

• “The Aesthetics of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer,” Guest Lecture for course “The American Novel Since 1945.” Yale University, Mar 2016

• “Paris, 1848: Topographies of Utopia in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show,” Society of Utopian Studies, Newcastle, July 2015

• “Deep Maps and Picture Postcards: Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place,” Guest Lecture for course “Global Fictions,” Yale University, May 2015

• “Making a World of One’s Own: Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World,” Utopian Studies Society Conference, Charleston, Nov 2013

• “At the Heart of Darkness: Postcolonial Rewriting and Global Capitalism in Tayeb Salih’s Seasons of Migration to the North” Lingnan University, Hong Kong, May 2009

• SEDA-PDF Award (Active Blended Learning Enhancement@Lingnan), Staff and Educational Development Association, UK (2022)

• Best Dissertation, Department of English, Yale University (2021)

• Best Essay Accepted for Publication, Department of English, Yale University (2019)

• Summer Language Institute Fellowships, Yale University (2016)

• Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fellowships for Overseas Studies, Hong Kong (2012-2015)

• R. K. Simpson Prize in English, University of Hong Kong (2005)

• HSBC Local Bursary and Scholarships (2005)