Dr Xiaofan Amy Li, Lecturer in Comparative Literature, has been awarded the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation travel fund by the European Association for Chinese Studies (EACS).

The funding will allow Amy to undertake research trips to sinological libraries within the UK. She will use this opportunity to consult scholarship on classical Chinese literature and its translation history, to complete a book manuscript she is co-authoring with colleagues at the University of Oxford.

The book is provisionally entitled Translation and Literature in East Asia: Between Visibility and Invisibility. It will ask: What specific problems do the translation and circulation of Chinese-script-based literature pose? What does translation render visible and invisible, especially if we compare various modern translations of classical Chinese literature into modern vernacular Chinese (baihua), modern Japanese, English, and French? Finally, do literary translational practices in pre-modern East Asia say something about a world literature before (rather than in) the global age?