Wei Zhou

I completed my PhD in English at the University of Leeds in 2022 with recognition for Research Excellence. I specialise in Modern and Contemporary Literature, Modernism, T. S. Eliot, and Classical Reception in Twentieth-Century Literature, with a particular interest in place, arts, cultural heritage, environment and sustainability.

As a LAHRI Postdoctoral Research Fellow, I have published articles in leading academic journals, including The Journal of T. S. Eliot Society (UK), The Year’s Work in English Studies, CoSMo: Comparative Studies in Modernism, and James Joyce Broadsheet. My forthcoming article ‘“Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck”: Shipwrecked Nostos in a Ulyssean Palimpsest in The Waste Land’ will be published by Forum for Modern Language Studies in October 2024. I am currently working on my first monograph entitled Homecoming and Poetry: T. S. Eliot’s Many Returns. In the book based on my PhD research, I will explore the implications of home and homecoming across Eliot’s oeuvre to upend the current critical discourse preoccupied with exile in Modernism and ask what home means to us by acknowledging migration and mobility in the shaping of human history. I am also co-editing a special issue of Modernist Cultures entitled Yorkshire Modernisms. The special issue will reappraise the role of Yorkshire in forging a new paradigm of Modernist Studies.

I am keen to collaborate with academics and external stakeholders to develop interdisciplinary research projects. At Leeds, I have worked as a research assistant at the Centre for Endangered Languages, Cultures and Ecosystems (CELCE) in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies (LCS) and the School of Geography. I also contributed to creating a Smeaton 300 Project entitled ‘Roots and Journeys: Poetry on Busses’. The project is run by the University of Leeds Poetry Centre and Leeds University’s Institute for Transport Studies in collaboration with the West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA).

Apart from undertaking research projects, I have taught on a range of Undergraduate and Pre-Masters modules. I was recognised as Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (Advance HE) in 2021. The modules I have taught at the University of Leeds include:

• ‘Modern Literature’ (UG)
• ‘Drama: Reading and Interpretation’ (UG)
• ‘Poetry: Reading and Interpretation’ (UG)
• Language for Law (PG–pre-sessional)

Qualifications

PhD English

MA English Language and Literature

BA English

Professional memberships

Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society

British Association for Modernist Studies

British Comparative Literature Association

Modern Languages Association

Modernist Studies Association

The International T. S. Eliot Society

T.S. Eliot Society (UK)

Recent Publications

In preparation

Monograph: Homecoming and Poetry: T. S. Eliot’s Many Returns. c.80,000 words (preparing a book proposal and two sample chapters)

Special issue: Yorkshire Modernisms, ed. with Lucy Cheseldine. C. 65,000 words (issue proposal accepted by Modernist Cultures in May 2024)

Forthcoming

Journal article: ‘“Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck”: Shipwrecked Nostos in a Ulyssean Palimpsest in The Waste Land’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, (ready for typesetting; scheduled to be published in October 2024). 8,942 words.

Published

Journal articles

‘XIV Modern Literature. 6(a) British Poetry Pre-1950: General’, The Year’s Work in English Studies, 103 (2024), 71–78 https://doi.org/10.1093/ywes/maae016

‘T. S. Eliot’s Sartorial Imagination: Poetry, Fashion and Culture’, The Journal of T. S. Eliot Society (UK) 2024, 1–31 <http://s699163057.websitehome.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Journal-of-the-T.S.-Eliot-Society-UK-2024-complete.pdf>

‘T. S. Eliot and the Return of the Soldier: Re-gendering Nostos in The Waste Land’, CoSMo: Comparative Studies in Modernism, 22 (Spring) 2023. Special Issue on 1922/2022: Total Modernism (vol.1), 101-14 <https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/ COSMO/article/view/7205>

Short Publications

‘Eliot’s Criterion and “Ulysses”’, James Joyce Broadsheet, 123 (October 2022), p. 6. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48713687

‘Review of Virgil and Joyce: Nationalism and Imperialism in the Aeneid and Ulysses, by Randall J. Pogorzelski’, James Joyce Broadsheet, 118 (February 2021), p. 3.

‘Review of The Classics in Modernist Translation, edited by Miranda Hickman and Lynn Kozak’, James Joyce Broadsheet, 116 (June 2020), p. 3.

SELECTED PRESENTATIONS

 Academic conference papers

'F.M. in 1924: Vivien Eliot, The Criterion and Autobiografiction', Modernism in 1924 – Online Conference, Centre for Modernist Cultures, University of Birmingham, 17 Jul 2024

‘Encountering Stetson: Cosmopolitan Belonging and Spiritual Return After the Great War in The Waste Land’, in the peer seminar ‘Eliot on Peacemaking, War, and Reconstruction’ at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the International T. S. Eliot Society, St. Louis, MO, United States, 23 Sep 2022

‘“The darkness shall be the light”: Subterranean Homes and Spiritual Homecoming in “East Coker”’, Hopeful Modernisms: The Conference of the British Association for Modernist Studies, University of Bristol, 23 – 25 Jun 2022

‘The Return of the Soldier: Reframing Heroic Nostos in the Space of Femininity in The Waste Land’, 1922/2022 – Total Modernism: Continuity, Discontinuity, and the Experimental Turn, University of Turin, Italy, 18 – 20 May 2022

‘Modernist Nostos in Dialogue: T. S. Eliot’s Notes to The Waste Land and Valéry Larbaud’s Lecture on James Joyce’s Ulysses’, New Work in Modernist Studies 2019, University of Liverpool, 6 Dec 2019

‘The Waste Land in Paul Muldoon’s “American Standard”’, Modernist Legacies and Futures, NUI Galway, Ireland, 17 – 18 May 2019

Public talk

ChatGPT and Linguistic Biases’, Northern Green Gathering, Meanwood Valley Urban Farm, Leeds, September 2023

Recently Organised Conferences and Seminars

• Ephemeral Modernisms: The Conference of the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS), School of English, University of Leeds, 27-29 June 2024
• CELCE Research Seminar Series, University of Leeds, October 2023
• Women and Energy Poetry Show, online and at the Goethe Zentrum, Kampala, Uganda, 23 September 2023
• Yorkshire Modernisms–A Northern Modernism Seminar, University of Leeds, 20 May 2023