Yawen received her 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 of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh.

Research interests

• Sinophone literature and culture
• Postcolonial and world literature
• Solidarity, internationalism, and cultural activism
• Kinship, belonging, and intimacy in literature
• Representations of trauma, mourning, and memory

Yawen’s first monograph, The Melancholy of Kinship in Post-reform China and Postcolonial Literature, brings post-reform Chinese cultural texts into conversation with postcolonial novels from Africa and Asia to explore the shared experience of kinship loss as a response to state violence, socioeconomic dispossession, and historical trauma. She currently researches literary and cultural responses to global political struggles, with a particular focus on grassroots Chinese artist-activists’ engagements with transnational forms of anticolonial solidarity.

Teaching

Yawen teaches comparative and world literature modules and has experience teaching a range of introductory courses in literary and film studies.

Expertise and public engagement

Yawen regularly contributes to Sinophone media platforms such as Initium Media, The Paper, and Jiemian News on postcolonial criticism, racial politics, labour culture, feminist imaginaries, and transnational activism. She has also translated works by Arundhati Roy and Refaat Alareer into Chinese. Yawen welcomes opportunities to discuss and share her research.