MALCS - Master of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies

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Prof. Beth Harper

MA, Sinology, SOAS, University of London (2018)

PhD, Comparative Literature and Renaissance Studies, Yale University (2016)

International Chinese Language Program, National Taiwan University (2014)

MPhil, European Literature and Culture, Cambridge University (2008)

MA, Classics, Cambridge University (2007)

Assistant Professor

PROFILE

I work across premodern European and Chinese literature and theory, with particular interests in tragedy, lyric, and comparative poetics. I am at work on a book entitled: Nothing but Time: the Tragic Bind of the Child in European Tragedy which reframes the European tragic tradition as a meditation on failed futurity. My next project: The Therapeutic Lyric will examine how the prestige literary cultures of ancient China and the Latin West use the lyric form to craft an art of life. Recent work has appeared in Shakespeare, English Studies, postmedieval, Comparative Literature: East & West, The Journal of East-West Thought, and is forthcoming in the Journal of World Literature and History of Humanities. A committed premodern comparatist, I have undergone training in Latin, Ancient Greek, French, German, Italian and Spanish, as well as classical and modern Chinese. Before arriving in Hong Kong, I was a Yale-China fellow at China Central Normal in Wuhan, a teaching fellow at the École normale supérieure in Lyon, and a researcher-in-residence at the École normale supérieure in Paris. Prior to my appointment in Comparative Literature, I held a post-doctoral fellowship in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at HKU.