Shiyi Sherry Zha

Profile

I am a PhD candidate at LCS, University of Leeds.

My current research project reconsiders the relation between East Asian literary modernism and modernity by examining how writers experimented with language and narrative techniques to convey modern subjects’ encounters with modernity, specifically within the realms of urban life, cinema, and mass culture.This project aims to further the argument advanced by the current studies on modernities and modernism, that interwar Japanese and Chinese modernist literature were not shaped through the adoption of Western culture but instead as a reaction towards the socio-historical context of the 1920s and 1930s Tokyo and Shanghai. Many critical examinations of modernism, especially in the studies of Japanese modernist literature, have overlooked the embodied spatial experience. ‘Embodied spatial experience’ refers to the way individuals perceive and interact with physical spaces through their own bodies and senses. It emphasizes the idea that our perception of space is not purely intellectual or abstract but deeply connected to our physical presence in that space.

Before joining Leeds, I recieved my MA in East Asian Studies from Brandeis Univeristy and BA in Comparative Literature from Boston University.

Research interests

Japanese literature, Japanese aesthetics, phenomenology and psychoanalysis, the senses and perceptions, cities and space