Amelia Zhou, Wolfson

Degree: PhD
Course: English
Supervisor: Professor Kasia Boddy
Dissertation Title: Intermedial experimentation in contemporary autotexts

Biographical Information

I am a second-year PhD candidate based in the Faculty of English. I previously completed a BA in communication at the University of Technology Sydney (2015), and a one-year Honours degree in cultural studies at the University of Sydney (2017). I also gained a MA in Creative Practice at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music & Dance (2020), where I was a Leverhulme Arts Scholar and awarded the highest achievement prize in my cohort. My doctoral project is generously funded by the Smuts Cambridge International Scholarship. 

In 2024-25, I am teaching on the Part I Practical Criticism and Part II Visual Culture papers and supervising a dissertation on contemporary photo-poetry. I welcome supervision enquiries related to my research interests.

I am currently an emerging critics fellow at the Sydney Review of Books (2024-25) and a convenor of the faculty's 20th Century and Contemporary Research Seminar (Lent 2025).

aaz30@cam.ac.uk

Research Interests

My doctoral project is situated at the intersection of literary and visual culture studies. It explores the political-aesthetic role of photography in largely anglophone life narratives from the 1970s to the present through a comparative approach, considering how authors invoke photographic images, discourses, and tropes to narrate individual and collective lives and histories reputedly disappearing, absent, or otherwise forgotten. This research involves a particular interest in life narratives that centre on themes relating to migration, atrocity, and the ongoing legacies of colonialism and imperialism. Key authors: John Berger, Michael Ondaatje, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Brian Castro, Orhan Pamuk, Teju Cole, Valeria Luiselli, Anwen Crawford, Don Mee Choi.

Research interests include: interfaces between modern/contemporary literature and visual culture (particularly photography and film); photography theory & criticism; text-image relations; modalities of the 'auto' (e.g. autofiction, 'autotheory'); critical & cultural theory; post & anticolonial theory; hybrid-genre and formally innovative contemporary writing; interfaces between movement, embodiment, and language; migrant literature and art; politics and aesthetics of opacity and illegibility.

Selected Publications

REPOSE (Wendy's Subway, 2024). 

https://www.ameliazhou.info