World Comparative Literature Doctoral Forum (i)
Wednesday 11 November 2026
13:00 - 14:15
Online and Schwarzman 10.302
Nuo Chen (Hong Kong University), B. Gregory (Manchester), Felicity Moffat (KCL), Kexin Tan (Hong Kong Polytechnic)
Four recent graduates of the MSt Comparative Literature and Critical Translation present their doctoral research and reflect on their institutional settings.
Nuo Chen (Hong Kong University) is exploring how processes of verbal and cultural translation enable the sublime—an ostensibly “untranslatable” term of transcendence—to be reconfigured as a revolutionary keyword that mediates the relation between the self, the transcendent Other, and collective political experience across the French Revolution, the Russian Decembrist revolt, and the 1911 Chinese Revolution. This is in the context of the Joint PhD Programme in Comparative Literature between the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and King’s College London (KCL).
B. Gregory (University of Manchester) is working to reorganise the power structures of psychiatric writing, positioning the ill author as an oppressed minority, functionally silenced and dehomed within the dominant landscape of diagnosis. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s schizoanalysis, my project hypothesises a schizopoetics: a mode of literature defined by non-linearity and the flattening of hierarchical organisations of logic. An enabling context for this work is UoM’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Arts and Languages (CIDRAL).
Felicity Moffat (King's College London) researches contemporary representations of middle-aged women in French language cultural production (from France and other French speaking territories) incorporating comparative work both between these French language texts but also with fictional texts published elsewhere in the Global North. She was awarded her doctorate in May, and is now an early career researcher at KCL, working for the government-funded organisation Language Acts and Worldmaking,
Kexin Tan (Hong Kong Polytechnic University) is researching the construction of cancer narratives in China, as well as the counter-discourses individuals use to challenge them. Her research draws onthe expertise in communication, applied linguistics, and professional practice in the Department of English and Communication at HKPU.
The World Comparative Literature Doctoral Forum is an open-ended series of seminars enabling conversation between doctoral students in comparative literature and literary translation studies worldwide, together with a consideration of their institutional settings.
If you would like to participate in the next instalment, please email comparative.criticsm@st-annes.ox.ac.uk.
