Professor Kwong Ho Yee Connie

Prof. Connie Kwong received her BA and MPhil in Chinese Language and Literature from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and her PhD in French and Comparative Literature from the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV). She also got a master’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of Vincennes Saint-Denis (Paris VIII). She has been teaching at the Chinese University of Hong Kong since 2006. She was a visiting professor (enseignant-chercheur) at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) in France in 2014 and a visiting scholar at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy of Academia Sinica in Taiwan in 2019.

Prof. Kwong’s chief interest in research includes the Twentieth-century Chinese literature, literary theories and criticism, comparative literature as well as transcultural studies. She published her first monograph in French in 2011: Du Langage au Silence: l’évolution de la critique littéraire au XXème siècle. It carries out research into the evolution of literary theories in Europe and the translatability of theories between different cultures in the Twentieth-century. Her second monograph, Fanal Obscur: Chinese Modernists and European Leftist Literature and Art (2017), focusing on the period from the Chinese Great Revolution in 1927 to the end of the Second World War in 1945, makes an investigation into the relationship between the Chinese modernist literature and the European leftist literature and reveals the complexity and hybrid nature of Chinese literary modernity. Her recent book Shuttling between East and West: The Transcultural Dialogue of Contemporary and Modern Chinese Literature (2019) puts the emphasis on the relativity of the concepts of East and West in the studies of the Twentieth-century Chinese literature. It examines how Chinese writers re-define their own cities, literature and cultural position at a time when it was only correct and fashionable to talk about the binary oppositions such as East and West, Europe and Asia, Self and Others as well as Local and World. She has also compiled, edited and annotated Dai Wangshu’s Literary Translation Works in Hong Kong during the Second Sino-Japanese War (2014). These once-neglected source materials have since made complete a literary picture that, upon its completion, is able to tell the heterogeneity of Chinese modernist literature developed in the wartime period and the transmission of European literature in China in a transcultural context.