Video Podcast: The Literature of Things: The Mansion of Secluded Books, Shu Yin Lou

Research Talk Series, Summer 2020

Speaker: Jannis Jizhou Chen, Ph.D. Candidate in Chinese Literature, Harvard University 

Produced by the Harvard University Asia Center

Jannis Jizhou Chen graduated from the National University of Singapore in 2015 with a B.A. with Honours in Chinese Studies and received his Master’s degree from Harvard University (Regional Studies East Asia) in 2017. Now, he is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Jannis is a published writer in Chinese language aspiring to become an academic.

His research is situated at the confluence of environmental humanities, critical theory (including posthumanism, new materialisms, Object-Oriented Ontology, and Chinese literary and philosophical discourses on things), and twentieth- and twenty-first century Sinophone literature.

His current project, titled Literature of Things, addresses the recent ecological and posthuman turn in narrative fiction produced in the greater Sinophone world, including China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia.