Dr Po-hsi Chen

Po-hsi Chen is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Taiwan Studies at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and a Postdoctoral Associate at Jesus College.

Academic interests

Po-hsi Chen’s academic interests include: 

• Taiwanese literature
• East Asian Studies
• Global leftism
• Postcolonialism.

Degrees obtained

• BA, National Taiwan University.
• MA, National Central University.
• PhD, Yale University.

Awards and prizes

• Marston Anderson award for outstanding dissertation in East Asian Languages and Literatures, Yale, 2020.
• Fulbright Graduate Study Grant, 2013.
• Overseas Studies Fellowship, Ministry of Education (Taiwan), 2013.

Biography

Po-hsi Chen is a literary historian specialising in Taiwanese literature during the Cold War era. His dissertation situates the politics of emotions in Cold War Taiwan literature within transnational radical movements. More specifically, by tracing the cross-Strait and transpacific circuit of banned books, radio short waves, spoken drama, and the ‘red classics’ propaganda films, he analyses how postwar left-wing writers from Taiwan perceived the ambivalent legacies of China’s socialist revolutionary trajectory.

His articles are available (or forthcoming) in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC), Chinese Literature Today, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and East Asian Journal of Popular Culture. In addition to his own research, he also translates extensively topics ranging from Taiwanese fiction, Indian feminism, queer modernity, liberation theology, colonial Latin America, Western films in the Soviet, to the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.

Other interests

Sports.