Congrats! You've found me!

(For more information, please go to https://jannisjizhouchen.academia.edu/)

Hello, whoever you are and for whatever reasons you have, congratulations! You have found me!

Here is some information about me as a scholar and writer. I hope that they will help you to understand me better.

Currently, I am a PhD candidate at the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University.

I graduated from 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. 

My 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.

My current project, titled The 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.

 

I was born in Chengdu and left China in my teens.

Since then I have sojourned in Singapore, Germany and the United States. My multimodal migratory experience has largely informed my writings.

I am a multiple-time winner of the Singapore Tertiary Chinese Literature Awards and the Lianhe Zaobao Gold Award. My first book, The Stories of Eng Watt Street (永發街事), is a collection of twelve short stories set in Singapore. The book explores themes such as migration, sexuality, religion and intergenerational issues among family members of migrant background.

Book Cover

My short stories are published in the greater Sinophone world including China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore.

Recent Online Talk:

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