Research Interests
Roy Chan's primary research interests are modern Chinese and Russian literatures. His dissertation (2009) focused primarily on the rhetoric of dreams and reality and its relation to issues of literature, modernity and revolutionary utopianism in modern Chinese fiction. He is currently revising it into a book manuscript tentatively titled The Edge of Knowing: Dreams and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature. His second project engages in a translingual and transcultural literary critique of Soviet/Russian and Chinese literary texts that address the other country tentatively titled A Reflection of Sovereignty: Revolutionary Utopia and Transnational Desire in Russian and Chinese Literatures. Literary interests include the study of prose genres, realism, and narrative discourse. Theoretical concerns include Marxism, ideological fantasy, the relationship between materiality and semiotics, and the relationship between affect, rhetoric and politics.
Background
Roy majored in Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington (2002), where he received the school's President's Medal upon graduation. He received his Ph.D. (2009) from the University of California, Berkeley in Comparative Literature, specializing in both Chinese and Russian literatures. He has been an IIE Fulbright Visiting Scholar in China (2007-2008), and is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. He offers courses in Chinese literature and culture, focusing on modern but also branching into the late-Imperial period. He hopes to offer more courses that focus on the relationship between premodern and modern periods in Chinese culture, as well as comparative studies between China and the West. His dream course in the near future would be a class on 1980s pop culture.