Staff profile

About Me

I am a Ph.D. student in Durham University’s Department of English Studies (since Jan 2024), supervised by Dr. Susan Valladares and co-supervised by Dr. Helen O’Connell, working on Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Comedy.

Before joining Durham, I studied in Peking University’s Department of Chinese Language and Literature (BA, 2016-2020) and its Institute of Comparative Literature and Comparative Culture (MA, 2020-2023, supervised by Professor Zhang Pei). My graduate research focuses on Shakespearean Drama, with a master thesis titled “‘Disembedding’ the Comedy Genre: A Study of Shakespeare’s Problem Plays.”

During the final year of my master’s program, I served as a teaching assistant for the graduate course ‘Western Literary Theory in the 20th Century’. Additionally, I conducted the tutorial class for the undergraduate course ‘Comparative Literature: An Introduction.’ I also had the opportunity to be an exchange student at Leuven University for the academic year 2021-2022.

Having been raised in Hong Kong, I have been serving as a Cantonese lecturer at Peking University since 2018. I was also once the Freshers Coordinator for the school’s Hong Kong Culture Association.

Research Topics

My current research focuses on the Marital Politics in English Comedies from the beginning of the Restoration to the 1737 Licensing Act. It examines how playwrights creatively adapted marriage, the conventional core element of the comedic genre, to the developing social and political realities of the period and, in doing so, clarifies the many and varied ways the genre worked and responded ideologically to the realities of its time.

Shakespearean Drama, and to a larger scale, English Early Modern Drama, mainly comedy, is another research field I am still proceeding with, as inherited from my master’s research. Currently I am working on a Chinese annotated scholarly edition of All’s Wells That Ends Well.

Additionally, as a comparatist, I have a significant research interest in the modernisation of Chinese literature from a cross-cultural perspective, especially the genesis and transformation of genres under Western (and Japanese) influence, as well as the appropriation of Western literary concepts. 

Conference Paper

• The ‘“little” she-philosopher’ and her ‘Power’: Negotiating the ‘Learned Lady’ through the Comedic Marriage Plot in Susanna Centlivre’s The Basset Table, Presented at BSECS 55th Annual Conference “Big and Small” (2026), University of Oxford. 
• Cuckoldry, Emasculation, and the Problem Plays: The Inverted Gender Politics in the Marital Resolution of All’s Well That Ends Well, Presented at SRS 11th Biennial Conference “Interconnections” (2025), University of Bristol. 
• Performing Bodily-Social Experiences: The Empirical Poetics in Restoration Comedy, Presented at BSECS 54th Annual Conference “Bodies and Embodiment” (2025), University of Oxford. 
• Translating Shakespeare’s Name: The Early History of the Genesis of the Western Dramatic Genre in Late Qing China, Presented at “Translating Shakespeare between the East and West” (2024), University of Birmingham. 

Other Research Interests

My primary interest lies in the History of Genre and Genre Theory. Genre often serves as a bridge between strictly aesthetic and culturally operative subjects, offering a framework for reading how, under specific historical and social conditions, each literary form struggles to create an artistic‑literary world of its own by interpreting the varying modes of social consciousness. Thus, a genre always participates in social and ideological production and reproduction, and can be interpreted as a vehicle for ideological contestation and social change. In this context, my study mainly explores how the ideological import of a genre negotiates with the social conditions of the material reality. This relationship between genre and history should not be viewed in terms of reflection and determination but in terms of interplay and reorientation.

Additionally, genre study serves as a fundamental and essential field within Comparative Literature, even in the absence of cross‑cultural investigation, because a genre’s membership (classification) is always determined by comparison and relation. I propose that when writers adapt a particular genre, they constantly reconfigure and reconstruct the literary form to suit their creative genius, reader expectations, and socio‑ideological‑material conditions by appealing to their predecessors or to literary conventions. Since this constitutes a process of negotiation and recreation, the choice and use of a genre always create a dialogue between the contemporary and the traditional, between literary space and material reality, and between author and receptor. This characteristic aligns with the essence of comparative literature.

Last but not least, I am interested in the History of Literature and Its Writing. Investigating the formation and canonisation of a particular nation’s or culture’s literary history within native and intercultural contexts, as well as the perspectives and writing strategies of literary historians, builds a dialogue between modern views and past objects. This comparative perspective allows me to reflect on the identified nature and characteristics of a particular literary tradition and to interpret the reasons for, and limits of, such identification. It is essential to continually reconsider and re‑engage with the past in order to refresh our understanding of it and, in doing so, to maintain an active reflection on modernity. This is particularly pertinent when the history of literature itself reflects the history of human intellect and ideas. This investigation also provides an opportunity to reflect on how and why people used to read, and on what has shaped our current consciousness of literature, thereby suggesting directions for future reading.

All these interests are pertinent to reviewing and reinterpreting literary history by either investigating historical dialogues or by establishing new dialogues between modern views and the past. They may be synthesised under the title of ‘Classical Interpretation and/through Modern Criticism’, which serves as the overarching formulation of my research interests.

I welcome any enquiries about my research and potential collaboration opportunities, please feel free to contact via email: hao.y.zhang@durham.ac.uk

• Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Comedy
• Shakespearean Drama
• Genesis of Genres and Appropriation of Western Literary Concepts in Modern Chinese Literature
• History of Genre and Genre Theory
• Comparative Literature
• History of Literature and Its Writing