Dr Po-Hsi Chen

Po-hsi Chen is currently Post-Doctoral Fellow in Taiwan Studies at the Department of East Asian Studies and a Post-Doctoral Associate at Jesus College, Cambridge. Prior to his current appointments, he worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences in Taipei. Po-hsi received his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University, where his dissertation, 'Socialism on One Island: A Genealogy of the Pro-Unification Leftist Literary Discourse in Taiwan', was awarded the Marston Anderson Prize for outstanding dissertation in East Asian Languages and Literatures. His research focuses on the politics of emotions in Cold War Taiwanese literature and its connection to transnational radical movements, specifically exploring how China's socialist experiments were reflected in Taiwanese and Chinese American diasporic communities through the cross-Strait and transpacific circulations of banned books, radio short waves, spoken drama, and propaganda films.

Po-hsi's research interests include literary exchange across the Chinese-language world during the Cold War era, Marxist literary and aesthetic theories, and the global sixties. He is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Importing Revolution: Envisioning Socialist China in Cold War Taiwan Literature.

In addition to his academic work, Po-hsi is a freelance translator, having translated works on 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. His works on the history of reportage literature, modern Chinese literature in the cultural Cold War, and Sinified Marxism and postcolonial studies have been published in various academic journals, including Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC), Chinese Literature Today, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and East Asian Journal of Popular Culture.