👩‍🏫 About
Men Bozhou is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Translation Studies at Fudan University (Shanghai, China). She began her academic journey as an English major and received both her B.A. and M.A. in English Language and Literature from Peking University (Beijing, China). In 2019, she earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara. As a comparatist with expertise in both Sinophone and Anglophone literatures and cultures, she has developed academic interests and pedagogical experience in modern Chinese consumerist culture and popular literature, transpacific cultural studies (with an emphasis on China), literary and cultural translation (Chinese-English), as well as comparative literature.
🔬 Research
Her current research project, titled “Modern Shanhaijing: Extraordinary Bodies and the Global Imaginaire in Fin-de-Siècle China,” explores a pivotal historical moment when the Han-ethnocentric worldview was confronted by a Euro-Americentric global imaginaire. Focusing on the construction, global circulation, and local reception of the Victorian concept of freakery, her project investigates how the Chinese negotiated their place in a modernizing world, and how they joined a global imaginaire that pathologized and even enfreaked them as a race. Unlike the widely-accepted viewpoint that attributes China’s conceptualization of the modern world and itself to its absorption of Western influences, she argues that early Chinese media and its audiences participated in a Euro- and Americentric global imaginaire not merely to absorb its ideologically laden information, but also to reshape the discourse through (mis)translating, reprinting, reading, and representing. In this way, she attempts to restore the role that the “cacophonous noise” of marginalized people played in imagining and documenting the modern world.
đź“š Teaching
As an educator, she has developed 1 graduate course and 8 undergraduate courses, and served as a teaching assistant for another 13 courses. These courses cover a wide range of subjects, including Chinese literature and culture, East Asian literature, translation studies, comparative literature, and global humanities. Since 2023, she has also served as a mentor at Zhide College, Fudan University, supporting the academic and personal development of more than twenty freshmen in the College of Foreign Languages and Literatures.