Biography:
Wayne CF Yeung joins Penn State in 2017 under the dual-title program with comparative literature and Asian studies. His research interests include modern and contemporary Chinese and Sinophone literature and culture, French and Francophone literature and culture, and world cinema. His dissertation, tentatively titled “Democracy and its Doubles: Extraterritoriality and Representing the People in Sinophone and Francophone Fictions,” explores how literatures from politically contested and non-sovereign spaces experiment with self-definition and popular, democratic figuration in critique of the entanglement of empire, nation, and the center’s assumptions about the “people.” The dissertation examines the intertextual networks centered on modern Chinese author Lu Xun and French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline respectively across the Sinophone and Francophone worlds. His article, “Poetics of the People: The politics of debating local identity in Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement and its literature (2014–16)”, appeared on Modern Asian Studies, which examines the deliberative connection between Hong Kong literature and the city’s social movement. At Penn State, he has taught courses on transnational literature and cinema, Chinese cinema, and Chinese literature, and he has also worked as an instructor of beginner’s level Mandarin Chinese.