Dr Yawen Li holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from the National University of Singapore and King’s College London. Before joining King’s, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh.

Research interests

• Sinophone literature and culture
• Postcolonial and world literature
• Internationalism, solidarity, and activist cultures
• Kinship, intimacy, and political belonging
• Memory, trauma, and historical violence

Yawen’s research examines how literature and cultural production negotiate histories of colonialism, socialism, and their aftermaths across modern and contemporary China and the postcolonial world. She is particularly interested in how literary and artistic forms imagine alternative modes of kinship and political belonging beyond familial and national frameworks.

Her first monograph, The Melancholy of Kinship in Post-Reform China and Postcolonial Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026), examines post-1980s Chinese literature and documentary film alongside postcolonial novels from Africa and Asia, showing how narratives of fractured kinship under colonial, postcolonial, and postsocialist conditions give rise to new imaginaries of relationality and egalitarian futures.

Building on these interests, she is currently working on her second book project, Cultural Afterlives of Anticolonial Internationalism in Contemporary China, which investigates how grassroots Chinese writers, artists, translators, and cultural practitioners rework anticolonial and left internationalist traditions in response to recent struggles in Iran, Afghanistan, Palestine, Ukraine, and beyond. She is also co-editing the special issue ‘The Cultural Labor of Internationalism: Reorienting Solidarities in Times of Struggle’ for Verge: Studies in Global Asias. The CFP can be found here.

More broadly, her work explores how literature and cultural production mediate experiences of political repression, social inequality, and historical trauma in contemporary China, including projects on rural migrant workers, censored pandemic memories, sex-selective abandonment, and gendered domestic labour. Her work has appeared in The Palgrave Handbook of Literary Memory Studies, Chinese Literature and Thought Today, Made in China Journal, COVID-19 in International Media, Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Asian Interactions, and is forthcoming in The Journal of Gender Studies.

Teaching

At King's, Yawen teaches comparative and world literature at both BA and MA levels. Her teaching spans literary traditions from antiquity to the present and across Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, exploring literature through the lenses of history, diplomacy, translation, and visual culture across diverse genres and media. She also has experience teaching a variety of introductory and advanced modules in English and film studies at the National University of Singapore.

Expertise and public engagement

Yawen regularly contributes essays and cultural commentary to Sinophone media platforms including Initium Media, The Paper, and Jiemian News, writing on decolonisation, internationalism, solidarity, and social justice. She has translated works by Arundhati Roy and Refaat Alareer, as well as a scholarly book in medical anthropology, into Chinese. Yawen welcomes opportunities for research collaboration, translation, public talks, and media engagement.