Dr. Cherrie Kwok / 郭明欣

Research

My first book project is based on my doctoral dissertation, "After Haiti: Race, Empire, and Global Decadent Literary Resistance, 1804-1984." Placing the Global North in a comparative and multilingual conversation with the Global South, this book project offers a fresh evaluation of a multifaceted artistic and literary style named decadence in the long nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First, it elucidates a new history about the birth of decadence that starts with the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804)—the world's first and only successful slave-led rebellion—and its impact on the canonical decadent writers of the American, British, and French Empires. Second, it examines how enslaved and colonized writers and their descendents in the same time period created their own versions of artistic and literary decadence in order to cultivate forms of self-regard and decolonial thought within and against the era's racial and imperial oppressions. The project coins the term "Duvalian decadence" to describe their literatures, after nineteenth-century French decadent poet Charles Baudelaire's oft-disregarded Haitian mistress, Jeanne Duval. The project focuses primarily on Anglophone texts, but also engages with French, Cantonese, and Mandarin in their original forms and in translation, and Urdu, Persian, and Russian in translation. A digital archive about some of the writers in the book project is also in-progress.

An abbreviated list of publications and their respective awards is below. A full CV is available upon request.

Peer-Reviewed Literary Criticism

“Whimsical. Suggestive. Slight: The Quare Dandyism of W.E.B. Du Bois.” Awarded the Honorable Mention for the 2024 Northeast Victorian Studies Association Expanding the Field Essay Prize (now in preparation for journal submission).

“Race and Decadence: Charles Baudelaire, Jeanne Duval, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Afro-Asian Ornamentalism in the Global Nineteenth Century.” Victorian Studies. 65.3 (forthcoming Fall 2024).

“Symbolism, Empire, and the Dance: On Sarojini Naidu’s “Eastern Dancers” and Arthur Symons’s “Javanese Dancers.” Volupté: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, 4.2. (2021), 157–71. Awarded the 2021 British Association for Decadence Studies Postgraduate Essay Prize.

Awards, Grants, Fellowships, etc.

The Millicent Bell Prize for the Most Outstanding M.A. Thesis, Department of English, New York University (NYU) (2017); Sponsored participant for The Dickens Universe, NYU (2017); Dean’s Graduate Research Development Fund Award, University of Virginia (UVA) (2018); Graduate Fellowship, The Jefferson Scholars Foundation (2020-2022); Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Research Award, UVA (2020); Global South Lab Dissertation Proposal Fellowship, Institute of Humanities and Global Cultures (IHGC), UVA (2020); Buckner W. Clay Research Grant in the Humanities, IHGC, UVA (2021); Biennial Book Collecting Prize, Second Place, for Postcolonial Ephemera: Collecting Fragments of Decadent Hong Kong, The Bibliographic Society, UVA (2022); Graduate Global Research Grant, The Center for Global Inquiry + Innovation, UVA (2022); Sponsored participant for the Harvard Institute for World Literature, UVA (2022); Predoctoral-Postdoctoral Fellowship, The Jefferson Scholars Foundation (2023-2025).