Heng Xie is a PhD student in Comparative Literature funded by the China Scholarship Council. His research interests include translingualism, intermediality, and migration. His doctoral research examines how translingual writers—particularly Yoko Tawada and Yiyun Li—negotiate linguistic displacement, cultural translation, and gendered subjectivity through intermedial strategies, and how visual poetics can resist monolingual paradigms in contemporary world literature.

Heng was born and raised in Hangzhou, China, where he completed his undergraduate studies in English Language and Literature. He then completed an MSc in Comparative Literature at the University of Edinburgh, where he researched photographic evocations of time in diasporic fiction. His work has appeared in Critiques, The Explicator, and the Harvard East Asia Society Conference.

Heng’s research is supervised by Dr Áine McMurtry (Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures) and Dr Alice Xiang (Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures).