An intellectual home in challenging times

I heard about the IWL at Harvard University through the Graduate Center for Literary Research at UC Santa Barbara. There was a call for application to the IWL on the Center’s website. With generous support from the Center as well as the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at UCSB, I was honored to have attended Professor Lawrence Venuti and Professor David Damrosch’s seminars during the 11^th annual session of the Institute for World Literature in the summer of 2021. This program means a lot to me on both professional and personal levels.

The two seminars were highly attractive to me because of their pertinence to my prior and ongoing research. While I was an English major in China, Professor Venuti's works on translation studies had illuminated my inquiry into the political/ ideological undercurrents beneath the translingual encounters between Chinese and English. After I embarked on the journey of comparative literature studies in the US, Professor Damrosch’s discussion on world literature became a great source of inspiration for me to grasp the relationship between modern China and the world from literary and cultural perspectives. Their collective insights into translation and the global circulation of texts are still guiding my research on contemporary China vis-à-vis the world.

On a more personal level, this summer program provided me with an intellectual home while I was enduring an excruciating time. Actually, I attended the virtual seminars in the hospital because I had to take care of a family member who had just gone through an important surgery. To abide by the rules of the inpatient ward, I was not able to speak much, but through my headphones, the silent, saddening atmosphere in the hospital was lightened by brilliant intellectual exchanges between students and scholars from all over the world. Warm light in a dark period of my life, this program was not just an academic event but also an unforgettable spiritual companion to me.

Yan Liu

2021 IWL alumnusPhD student

Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies

UC Santa Barbara