Dr Wei Zhou (周维）

Profile

I completed my PhD in English at the University of Leeds in 2022, graduating with recognition for Research Excellence. Following a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute (LAHRI), I returned to the School of English as a Visiting Research Fellow in 2024.

My research focuses on modernist literature, with expertise in T. S. Eliot, poetry, classical reception, mobility, and place. I have published widely on Eliot's work, including studies of his re-gendering of the soldier's return from the First World War, his reimagining of shipwreck through a Ulyssean palimpsest, and the influence of fashion and material culture on his poetic idiom. I have also published research on the contribution of Vivien Eliot (Eliot’s first wife) to The Criterion as both a writer and co-editor, with a particular focus on how her use of various authorial identities troubles the distinction between life writing and fiction.

I have contributed reviews to The Year's Work in English Studies and James Joyce Broadsheet, covering British poetry (1900-1950) and classical reception in modernism. With Dr Lucy Cheseldine (University of York), I co-edited the special issue Yorkshire Modernisms for Modernist Cultures, which reappraises Yorkshire's role in shaping modernist literature and art.

From 2023 to 2025, I was part of the Smeaton300 project, ‘Roots and Journeys: Poetry on Buses’. This interdisciplinary project involved the University of Leeds Poetry Centre and the Institute for Transport Studies. Designed to help diverse community groups explore ideas of home and belonging while promoting sustainable travel, the project comprised a series of workshops that engaged more than 200 schoolchildren and 70 adults across Leeds in writing poetry about home and journeys. The workshops culminated in a poetry competition for both children and adults.

Research interests

My research interests include:

• Modernism

• T. S. Eliot

• Modern and contemporary poetry

• Classical reception in modern and contemporary literature

• The reception of the Odyssey in Modernism

• Place, mobility, and migration

• Regional modernisms

• Global modernisms

Current Research

Homecoming and Poetry: T. S. Eliot's Many Returns

I am currently working on a monograph, Homecoming and Poetry: T. S. Eliot's Many Returns, which develops research undertaken for my doctoral thesis, ‘Modernist Nostos in The Waste Land and Four Quartets’. This project argues that Eliot creates a poetics of homecoming informed by his migration, citizenship, and ancestry. Eliot reconceives what ‘home’ means in modernity by reimagining the classical trope of nostos, a term originating in Homer’s Odyssey that denotes both homecoming and the poetry of homecoming. By developing nostos as a conceptual framework, the book demonstrates how Eliot builds, maintains, and restores a sense of home and belonging in his poetry, especially in the context of global conflict and transnational mobility. In doing so, this project challenges the critical discourse of exile that dominates Eliot scholarship and modernist studies more broadly. In an age when migration and belonging are at the forefront of political and public debate, T. S. Eliot’s poetry offers literary insights into understanding multiple homes, multi-directional returns, and layered identities.

Overseas Students and the Making of Cosmopolitan Modernisms

I am also developing a new project, Overseas Students and the Making of Cosmopolitan Modernisms, which extends my interest in mobility and transnational experience beyond Eliot to a wider range of modernist writers. The project is the first sustained study of how overseas student experience shapes cosmopolitan modernisms. I will argue that the experience of study abroad, encompassing formal education and unfamiliar everyday life, provides a formative site of modernist consciousness. Focusing on Jean Rhys, Eithne Wilkins, Han Suyin, Mulk Raj Anand, and Wole Soyinka, the project will demonstrate how these writers repurposed their encounters with British pedagogies and lifestyles to innovate literary forms. By combining archival research and textual analysis, I will conceptualise the overseas student experience as a phenomenological model, offering fresh perspectives on the global impact of British higher education. My project will contribute to global modernisms by examining how Anglophone writers respond to British higher education in the context of imperial and colonial history and institutional expansion, and how their creative responses shaped modernist writing and the landscape of twentieth-century Anglophone literature more broadly.

Qualifications

• PhD English
• MA English Language and Literature
• BA English

Professional memberships

• Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society
• British Association for Modernist Studies
• British Comparative Literature Association
• Modern Languages Association
• Modernist Studies Association
• The International T. S. Eliot Society
• T. S. Eliot Society (UK)

Student education

Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (Advance HE)

I have taught across a range of undergraduate modules in poetry, drama, and modern literature. I have also taught on the University of Leeds Language Centre's pre-sessional English programme for postgraduate students.

Research groups and institutes

• English