Zoomcast Overview

Sophia Hsu interviews five nineteenth-century scholars (Menglu Gao, Waiyee Loh, Hyungji Park, Jessica Valdez, and Rae X. Yan) to discuss the development of a lesson plan cluster called “Transimperial Networks and East Asia.” This cluster explores the centrality of East Asia to Victorian Studies. A crucial impetus for this cluster, facilitator Sophia Hsu suggests, included finding an effective way to respond to the increase in anti-Asian violence and discrimination during COVID-19. The result became a dual partnership between breaking bread within a female pedagogical community while innovating class lessons that re-“orient” students’ relationship to the global nineteenth century.

Collaboration Series

This cluster of Zoomcasts reflects upon team-based scholarship as a strategy of undisciplining and empowerment in both learning and teaching. Although collaboration often lies at the heart of digital humanities projects like Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom, the single-scholar mode of endeavor and production often remains the default for many Victorianists. The Zoomcasts in this cluster, therefore, highlight successful collaborations within Victorian Studies and beyond in order to uncover strategies and models that Victorianists and other scholars might employ to broaden the scope and impact of their work. By doing so, scholars have the potential to develop new and exciting modes of inquiry, while breaking with traditional Eurocentric ways of engaging with Victorian and other kinds of British and Anglophone literature.

Guest Biographies

Menglu Gao is an Assistant Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Denver. She specializes in nineteenth-century British and Anglophone literature, with research interests in medical humanities, empire studies, and critical theory. Her current book project examines how medical theories relevant to opium use and addiction provided new ways for nineteenth-century authors to imagine imperial forms.

Waiyee Loh is an Assistant Professor of World Literature at Kanagawa University in Yokohama, Japan. Her research and teaching interests centre on the history of British and Japanese imperialism and their legacies in the present.

Hyungji Park is Professor of English Literature in the Department of English Language and Literature at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea. Her primary fields of research and teaching include Victorian literature, Korean popular culture, Asian American literature, and contemporary fiction, with a focus on post-colonial and gender issues. Her recent research is clustered methodological approaches of “locatedness” (i.e., doing English in Asia).

Jessica R. Valdez is a lecturer in literature at the University of East Anglia and previously taught at the University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on novelistic form, media, empire, and migration in nineteenth-century literature and culture. She is currently working on a new monograph tentatively called, Despots and Democrats: China and America in British Literature, 1832-1901.

Rae X. Yan is an Assistant Professor of British Literature from 1830 to 1900 at the University of Florida. She is currently at work on a book project about anatomizing as a joint literary and scientific practice during the Victorian era. Her research on this work has been published in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, and Dickens Studies Annual.