Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2024, English: Creative Writing

Lucky is a coming-of-age novella set in an elite girls' boarding school in India in the late 2000s. The story follows Poornima, a fourteen-year-old scholarship student from Assam, a minority state in Northeast India, after she joins Maharani Laxmibai School (referred to as “Lucky” by its students) and her journey navigating the social and class hierarchies of the school, a large number of whose students come from Indian royal families. The students at the boarding school are rarely allowed contact with the outside world, except for a seven-minute weekly phone call, and brief rare interactions with the Boys School (its elite boys-only brother school) from time to time. The novella's central plot revolves around the emergence of the secret mobile phone within the school and follows the changing and crumbling of its social hierarchies and relationships due to the phone's emergence.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, East Asian Languages and Literatures

This dissertation aims to shed light on why literati and scholar-officials developed an increased interest in theater from the mid-sixteenth century onward (aka, the late Ming dynasty). A substantial body of scholarship has examined late Ming literati's embrace of playwriting, but further research is needed to delineate the cultural mechanics of this “theatrical turn.” In this dissertation, I will approach this process through the lens of cross-genre interactions. Specifically, I will explore in what ways theater came to inform other cultural practices in everyday literati life, and vice versa. Examining the life writings of three late Ming literati, who were active during the Wanli reign (r. 1573-1620), this study shows how they employed different rhetoric, performative, and perceptual aspects of theatricality to innovate other existing literary forms. While being part of a highly interactive community of theater aficionados, they each chose a distinct literary genre other than theater as their primary medium to recall and record their theatrical experiences. The core analysis of this study centers around the multidirectional generic interplay between theater and the three literary genres they chose to write in respectively: poetry, diary, and preface. The chapters focus on how different aspects of theatricality informed traditional genres through the lenses of the construction of multiple points-of-view, the perception of time, and the presentation of bodily experience. At the same time, I examine these heterogenous genres as different forms of “life writing” to foreground how literati writers' were remarkably attentive to everyday life. My analysis reveals theater's impact on literati's literary responses to their everyday lives by way of innovative generic interplay. I do not treat “genre” as a static category, but as a malleable expressive vehicle that was transformed in the very process of being adapted to the new subject of theater. Moreover, adopting (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2024, East Asian Studies

In Edo-period (1603-1868) playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon's The Woman-Killer and the Hell of Oil (1721), the central character Yohei murders an innocent young mother. Scholars have debated the root cause behind this heinous crime, with scholars C. Andrew Gerstle and Eiji Sekine arguing that Yohei's actions resulted from a lack of parental love. However, these perspectives have not adequately addressed the prominent presence and influence of mother figures in the play. My paper shifts the focus of the play away from Yohei and addresses this lack of scholarly attention to the female characters by focusing on the literary theme “giri (social obligation) versus ninjo (personal feelings)” that is informed by Neo-Confucian rhetoric and is used to justify characters' actions. In other words, historicizing motherhood during the Edo period allows the blame for Yohei's actions to shift away from his parents and more squarely on his own volition. Specifically, I will discuss the mother characters' virtuous invocations of giri and ninjo and juxtapose them against Yohei's misuse of these concepts to explore how Chikamatsu emphasizes and dramatizes his flawed protagonist's misconduct. I argue that Yohei's misuse of Neo-Confucian rhetoric is evidence of his immoral character rather than his misfortune due to a lack of parental care. In conclusion, this project, by closely examining how giri and ninjo are used in Neo-Confucian rhetoric, sheds light on the boundaries of ethics in Edo-period society, and explores the tensions between a woman's social obligation towards her husband and own family's well-being and her maternal inclination to care for her own child and others.

Doctor of Musical Arts, The Ohio State University, 2024, Music

Legato is essential to Western classical singing, in as much as this singing is centered on the sonority and rhythm of words and the demonstration of a cultivated, sustained vocalism. Some Chinese regional dialects retain phonation characteristics from ancient Chinese dialects, which can significantly improve legato and sound quality in singing. The musical appreciation of ancient Chinese poetry – commonly used in modern Chinese art song – is made difficult by the seemingly stark contrast between ancient and modern Chinese spoken language. The present study takes advantage of a wide range of disciplines, including Chinese literature, linguistics, musicology, voice science, and physiology, to explore the value of ancient dialect as an integral aspect of performance practice in modern Chinese art song, and as a tool to assist with the physical demands of singing including the particular difficulties of legato. A comparative analysis will delve into the phonology of ancient Chinese poetry, exploring the character of Mandarin, ancient, and regional dialects, and examining the differences between modern and ancient Chinese words, with a focus on pronunciation. The study of ancient language helps to address the challenge of non-legato singing in Mandarin by identifying new possibilities in both composition and interpretation of art song, as will be discussed in relation to two songs: “Song of the Yue Boatman” and “Night Mooring at Maple Bridge.” In so doing, this comparison aims to uncover potential folk and regional influences for future development of Chinese art songs.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, English

My dissertation aims to discuss how Hong Kong literature, including speculative fiction, science fiction, and zines, in English or translated into English, might help us to open new avenues of transformation by working through the past and imagining alternative futures. Referencing scholars and activists in queer, transformative, and disability justice, Postcolonial Studies, and Hong Kong Studies, my dissertation adds new materials from the Hong Kong context to enrich the discussions of affect that have hitherto mostly focused on Western societies. It also employs affect as a heuristic device to re-examine the rampant neoliberalizing process and its dire consequences. Diverse and divergent as the materials for analysis are, they are all organized around an investigation into the collusional connection between the biopolitical regulation of populations and the manipulation of affective potentials that upholds and sustains the transnational neoliberal system. While foregrounding key concepts of decoloniality and affect from a range of interdisciplinary approaches, my project probes deeply into the question of what imaginations are intentionally denied, foreclosing possibilities of hope and change. The central questions that my study intends to answer are: How can literature and other cultural products created by Hong Kong writers and artists construct the foundation of a liberating aesthetic that reflects a capacity to imagine alternative worlds? And what are the conditions in which new forms of livability, sociality, and futurity can emerge, survive, and flourish? My project seeks to contribute to anticolonial traditions and decolonial thought. While grounded in literary and textual analysis, my research thinks with people's everyday practices under conditions of political and economic duress in imaginative and hopeful ways. Modelling the cross-disciplinary, cross-border work required for this moment and drawing from the rigorous and well-establ (open full item for complete abstract)

PHD, Kent State University, 2023, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

This dissertation investigates the production of Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier as a necrospace and how such a spatial formation contributes to the ungrievability of the local population. Drawing on the scholarship of bio(necro)politics, this dissertation examines a wide range of literary texts—from British colonial and Af-Pak anglophone literary works to Pashto literature in English translation—to discuss the symbiotic relationship between space and subjectivities. By adopting a bottom-up approach and analyzing subject formation under necropolitical conditions, this study adds an important missing link to the bio(necro)political framework that often focuses on the structure and operation of power. This dissertation argues that literature plays a significant role in conceptualizing the Af-Pak frontier as a necrogeography. This imaginative necrogeography normalizes violence in the region, renders local lives “ungrievable,” and subjects the local population to a persistent rule of death that limits their actions to either necroagency or disidentificatory practices. This dissertation also argues that instead of organized resistance to necropolitical structures and forces, various subjectivities—such as the death-bound, the implicated, and the quotidian—emerge in a necrospace.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, East Asian Languages and Literatures

My dissertation project is an exploration of the intricate literary networks encapsulated within two preeminent pre-Tang anthologies, Wen xuan and Yutai xinyong. I use the term “literary network” in a broader sense, which encompasses a wide range of interactions among literati and non-literati, as well as the textual connections generated across diverse genres of literature and transcending temporal boundaries. It deviates from the conventional approach that uses the concept of “community” in the cultural, literary, or social contexts to examine interactions among literati. Rather, I adopt a more complex notion of “network” to investigate the multi- layered relationships unveiled within the two anthologies. Through a network perspective, I consider not only direct relationships but also indirect connections, mutual influences, and interconnections within the network that cannot be identified by using only established approaches such as close reading. I recognize that literary influence and interactions are not confined to formal institutions or social hierarchies, but can occur across different social strata, genres, and time periods. By employing methodologies and tools from the Digital Humanities (DH), such as network analysis and data visualization, my study transforms information from basic data points into systems of relationships, thereby uncovering emerging patterns of social prominence and social interactions among writers and their inner circles, as reflected in the two pre-Tang anthologies. The objectives of my dissertation are threefold. First, it maps out the entire network of contemporaneous poetic communications in both Wen xuan and Yutai xinyong, as well as the comprehensive literary network, which crosses generic and periodic divisions, within the Wen xuan corpus. Second, it differentiates and analyzes various types and levels of social and literary influence, as indicated by weighted degree, betweenness, and various metrics through network ana (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2023, East Asian Languages and Literatures

The 1980s was a transformative decade when numerous ethnic minority writers began to emerge across a rapidly changing China, giving them an opportunity to tell stories about their people and cultures from their own perspectives. After restrictive policies on literature were relaxed in the late 1970s, poets began writing on themes, such as traditional culture, issues of representation, and conflicts between tradition and modernity. In addition to giving aesthetic form to their inner thoughts and emotions, many poets from this time expressed an interest in writing for their ethnic groups. Expanding on previous research on Southwest ethnic minority poetry by Mark Bender and D. Dayton, this thesis applies key aspects of Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical framework, including habitus, capital, and field, to the social aspect of writing poetry as a practice for writers from the Wa, Jingpo, and Lisu ethnic groups in China's ethnically diverse Southwest borderlands. Highlighting prominent authors, including Burao Yilu, Yimeng Hongmu, Yue Ding, Chen Hong, Mi Yingwen, and Li Guiming, this thesis argues that hybrid narratives found within the poems reflect the changing habitus of Southwest China. Further, using Bourdieu and Foucault's conceptions of power, this thesis demonstrates how poets take part in nuanced negotiations with social and political discourses to attain broader exposure and effect social change.

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2023, East Asian Languages and Literatures

Our understanding of what wisdom (zhi 智 in Classical Chinese) is, as well as what it means to be wise or to be seen as wise, is deeply rooted in our local habitation—the spaces, times, cultures, and experiences in which we live. Genres are one way we articulate wisdom as we see it, and some genres form precisely to express that wisdom. Moreover, because our imagination of a genre carries with it an imagination of the writer's identity, “wisdom genres” are often laden with assumptions about who the wise person writing them is or should be. In early medieval China, a genre called lianzhuti 連珠體 (strung pearls) was constructed, which in its earliest instantiations was presented as short remonstrative sets of important principles by ministers to the emperor. Thus, it was invested with ideas about the sort of person most suited to speak wisdom to the ear of power. However, as time passed and the genre was taken up by new and ever-expanding communities of writers, the wise advisor's persona also shifted and expanded—and in some cases was parodied—though it was always a component of the sense of the lianzhu genre. In this thesis, I examine strung pearls from the perspective of genre and practice, covering writings from the Han dynasty to the twentieth century with a focus on the works of Lu Ji 陸機 (261–303), Liu Xiang 劉祥 (451–489), Song Lian 宋濂 (1310–1381), Ye Xiaoluan 叶小鸞 (1616–1634), and Yu Pingbo 俞平伯 (1900–1990). I found my study on the theories of habitus and ritualization advanced by Pierre Bourdieu and Catherine Bell respectively, and I frame it with the work of genre theorists such as Amy Devitt, Anis Bawarshi, and Thomas Beebee. In doing so, I attempt to show that identity is a core element of how we formulate and use genres and that in the case of strung pearls, the persona conventionally associated with the genre (the wise advisor) continued to surface in the pieces even long after its original function became irrelevant.

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 1991, English

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2022, English

This thesis explores the epistemic injustices Hmong Americans have suffered within Western medicine in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. In contrast to medical and academic discourses, which blame “cross-cultural differences” as the cause for these health disparities, I contend Western medicine and society dismiss Hmong individuals' knowledge and experiences, which is particularly damaging to them as survivors of genocide, forced migration, and racial oppression. In the early twenty-first century, American hospitals attempted to improve their treatment of Hmong patients by designing “cross-cultural” trainings for shamans and physicians. Although these trainings aspired to welcome shamans into hospitals, they were not an example of cross-cultural exchange and instead prioritized Western practices, ignoring the curative value of shaman rituals. I analyze memoirs, ethnographies, and research materials from the Hmong Archives in St. Paul, Minnesota, to consider how shaman performances and behaviors redress epistemic injustices by acknowledging Hmong suffering, remembering communal losses, and resisting the scriptocentric expectations of Western medicine. With this interdisciplinary project, I investigate the synergies and tensions between Hmong literature, performance studies, and the medical humanities. My primary aim is to speak beside Hmong Americans and recognize how their practices provide a crucial method for countering medical inequality.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, East Asian Languages and Literatures

Classical literature does not live purely within the confines of its own pages, but lives on through its many afterlives, whether those are adaptations, parodies, allusions, etc., which become part of the history of the work and influence how readers interact with the text. At the present moment, manga about or containing classical literature are studied mainly as derivative adaptations or pedagogical tools rather than as texts in their own right contributing to the afterlife of the source text. Few scholars specialize in both classical literature and manga or comics, and as a result, there are very few studies that treat both the literary and visual aspects of the text with equal attention. Therefore, texts like Chihayafuru, a manga which incorporates classical Japanese poetry into its plot, have been overlooked despite their potential to contribute to the continuing legacy of the source text while also creating a separate and unique narrative. I aim to address this gap by providing a case study applying the techniques of close reading from classical literature and multimodal (visual and linguistic) analysis from comics studies to Chihayafuru; by combining the two, I examine the interplay of word and image and how it affects the reading of the manga itself as well as the interpretation of the source text. My findings indicate that through manga, poetry interpretation can be accessed through multiple modes, often working in tandem, and education about classical poetry is attainable without explicit instruction or even an educational aim. Readers do not learn only when they are cognizant of being taught, and indeed the ways in which Chihayafuru educates readers encourage an emotional connection to classical poetry over an academic one. Further, manga like Chihayafuru provide an important function that many other approaches to interpreting and engaging with classical literature do not: it provides a model for how readers can and should interact with the source tex (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2022, English

無月、雨月 no moon, rain moon is a collection of poetry that explores language, memory, family history, relationships, ritual and festivals, and the complexity of identity. It's interested in looking at the rifts between the poet's languages and cultures, as well as the ways in which the two come together, both in terms of identity and in terms of poetic and artistic intention. Through an exploration of the natural world, seasons, and the sensory, the intensely internal voice is linked to myth, in retelling and reinventing longstanding stories, as well as developing a personal myth of the self. It is dedicated to her Japanese grandmother, with whom she shares a birth month, astrological sign and Chinese zodiac sign.

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2022, English

Paper House is a collection of creative nonfiction essays about coming of age as an Asian American biracial and bisexual woman in China. The narrator goes to China to teach English in rural Shanxi Province for 2 years and struggles with her own loss of Chinese culture, and the loss of her Chinese grandmother who died before she was born. Through her daily life in China and visiting places her grandmother lived, the narrator tries to understand a homeland that she's been displaced from. Additionally, she attempts to navigate her in-between identities — biracial and bisexual within cultural contexts she is largely unfamiliar with, endeavoring to find a place where she feels like she belongs. Being perceived as an outsider, and the growing distance from her U.S.-based girlfriend amplifies loneliness. Ultimately, the narrator learns to accept care from strangers, her cat, and a constellation of women, and gains knowledge of self from family and ancestors. The prose holds tension between absence and abundance and moves patiently through scenes and images with a lyrical voice.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, East Asian Languages and Literatures

This dissertation theorizes a fourfold interpretative model through examining a major ethnic minority document from southwest China—Chronicles of Southwest Yi (Xinan Yi zhi, hereafter as The Chronicles). As a key text in understanding Yi written tradition from western Guizhou province, the document is difficult to access due to a decline in the number of native transmitters, the lack of a theoretical toolkit to unlock the content of the text, and prejudice against oral-connected texts written in unfamiliar genres on the part of some scholars. Building upon past Yi scholarship, genre theories, and epic studies, this project offers doable approaches to deciphering what is intended by the multiple generations of tradition-bears: 1) treating the translated volumes as a corpus to study the language thoroughly, 2) connecting the verses with information that can help uninitiated readers appreciate the artistry of the text, 3) taking into account consensuses reached by modern-day scholars to situate the text in its textual network, and 4) keeping track of afterlives and ramifications of traditional lore and voicing opportunities opened up by contemporary media. Besides methodological innovations, the dissertation also testifies The Chronicles as an encyclopedic compendium and reliable cultural-historical records.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, East Asian Languages and Literatures

This dissertation focuses on how authors, editors, and critics of “Hui literature” (Huizu wenxue) have positioned themselves and their works within the People's Republic of China and the Middle East. Hui literature is officially defined as works by Chinese-speaking Muslims who belong to the state-recognized Hui ethnic group. Scholars have noted that writers of Hui fiction often weave ethno-Islamic elements into their works. Building on this insight, I investigate how from the 1950s to the present producers of Hui literature have capitalized on their ethnic identity to brand literary journals, publishing houses, and research institutions. To map the evolving usages of “Hui literature,” I interviewed prominent members of the Hui literary community and collected sources from private archives. These sources inform my textual analysis of Hui works of fiction, revealing two co-existing yet divergent dynamics. In China, producers of Hui literature co-opt the Hui state-assigned ethnicity to gain a niche in the domestic market. In the Middle East, via Arabic translations, they switch to the framing “Chinese Muslims” to gain a niche within the global Islamic publishing market. I argue that this oscillation between “Hui” and “Chinese-Muslim” framings reveals how literary professionals involved in ethnic literature make strategic use of changing social, ideological, and economic resources to carve out an ethno-professional niche within increasingly interdependent regional, national, and transnational literary spheres.

Bachelor of Arts, Wittenberg University, 2019, East Asian Studies

The first decades of the 21st century have seen a remarkable rise in science fiction novels and short stories by Chinese authors, whose works have attracted international attention and success. Although highly imaginative and fantastical works of literature have a long history in China, the genre of science fiction has experienced long periods of interruption and obstacles that limited the genre's constant growth. During the Cultural Revolution, any films, books or plays that were not actively promoting the Chinese Communist Party were not condoned by the State or seen as useful to Chinese society. Science fiction literature generally did not fall within the strict confines of the socialist realism genre and therefore virtually died out during the middle of the twentieth century. As the Cultural Revolution ended, the influx of culture included non-Chinese science fiction literature and sparked a renewed interest in the genre. Three authors in particular, Han Song, Liu Cixin, and Hao Jingfang, are actively ushering in a new age of Chinese literature with their fascinating works of science fiction, which comment on the state of humanity and the Chinese experience. The new age of Chinese science fiction takes root in the satirical nature of the genre's origins, serving primarily as criticism of China's sociopolitical state. It is with these criticisms that modern science fiction authors employ the characteristics of the genre in order to openly, accurately and creatively portray their experience as Chinese people. This “Golden Age” of Chinese science fiction could be more accurately described as an “Electric Era,” containing a small but powerful spark that will soon light up as a global sensation, bringing critical discussions of the Chinese experience to both domestic and international readers.

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2020, English

My creative thesis, Desires & Debacles, consists of two short stories and a novella that explore themes related to communal, familial, and personal life in Pakistan. The stylistic texture of these pieces marks my departure from what is now the quintessential character of South Asian fiction: politically dense, lacking lightness, devoid of sensuality, and stylistically risk-averse. Spurning the external, commercially-defined standards, Desires & Debacles insists on its autotelic being: it follows Flaubert's aesthetic axiom by treating "a humble fact as respectfully as a big one" and by probing the "damp and mouldy corners of the soul."

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, EDU Teaching and Learning

This study offers a framework to scholars, educators, parents, librarians, and other book professionals to critically engage with and evaluate picturebooks, which they, in turn, could employ to facilitate sensitive reading practices with children. My framework juxtaposes theories of rhetorical narratology (which views narrative as a medium of communication between authors/illustrators and their audiences); narrative ethics (which is concerned with the ethics of what is being told in the narrative; of storytelling; and of the audience's response to characters and situations in the narrative), and narrative empathy (which examines how strategic formulation of narratives could evoke empathy). I argue that this schema is beneficial to our understanding of empathy as a response that needs to be critically investigated, especially with regards to literature for children that features diverse characters. Using picturebooks about the current refugee crisis set in the Middle East, I demonstrate how this framework can be employed to analyze representations of refugees and events of forced displacement, and more broadly, to examine the production, mediation, and consumption of these texts. My work calls for scholars, educators, and readers of picturebooks to view the verbal and visual narratives as a medium of communication among authors/illustrators and audiences. It illustrates how picturebooks are rhetoric; constructs crafted for particular purposes by authors and illustrators to convey specific ideas to their audiences, and questions the ethics of what is being told, how it is being told, by whom it is being told, and the audiences' responses to these three aspects of storytelling. My research illustrates that picturebooks on refugees are purposefully designed with the aim of eliciting empathy from child and adult readers while simultaneously distancing them from the conflict and/or the refugee characters not only in the main visual and verbal narratives, but also in th (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, East Asian Languages and Literatures

This dissertation addresses contemporary Chinese poetry's socio-cultural relevance through an investigation of a “crossover” (shige kuajie 诗歌跨界) trend that has loomed large in the past two decades, against poetry's paradoxical condition of being at once revered but barely read by the general public. This trend, in which practitioners simultaneously experiment with aesthetics and expand poetry readership by innovatively fusing poetry with other arts and forms of entertainment and communication, engages an extensive body of established and emerging poets, poetry texts and artworks, and various technologies. As the first systematic research into this long-existing, far-reaching, interdisciplinary trend, this dissertation not only offers insights into individual cases, but also challenges the theoretical and methodological limits to our vision of poetry's standing in contemporary Chinese life. This dissertation analyzes the following: the conversation between poetry and new folksong in a concert called In Ancient Times; the transference of poetry into paintings in the We Poetize itinerant exhibition and songs in the Sing a Poem for You television show; the integration of poetry into the documentary film The Verse of Us and the experimental theatre piece Following Huang Gongwang on a Visit to the Fuchun Mountains; and the interaction between poetry and social media in Li Cheng'en's personal poetry blog. Instead of viewing poetry as texts to be read in isolation, these cases call out for a reading of poetry as a multifaceted medium in constant interaction with other forms and media. Through the perspective of intermediality studies, which sees medial characteristics as both materially conditioned and historically conventionalized, all media as intersecting with and relying on each other, and medial borders as real but fluctuating, I illustrate common features of the crossover cases, chart out major ways in which medial borders are elicited and crossed, and demonstrate ho (open full item for complete abstract)