College:
St Anne’s College
Thesis Title:
Cities of One’s Own: Queer Urban Spaces in Post-1980s Sinophone and Japanese Literature
Supervisor:
Dr. Linda Flores
Educational background:
University of Manchester, MA Modern and Contemporary Literature (2023-24)
University College London, Affiliate Arts and Sciences (2021-22)
Hitotsubashi University, Japan, BA Social Sciences (2019-23)
Biography:
Before coming to Oxford, Sen pursued a wide range of interests across comparative literature, critical theory, and gender and sexuality studies at Hitotsubashi University and the University of Manchester. He is now a DPhil candidate at Oxford, where his research focuses on Sino-Japanese literary and social contexts, with particular attention to East Asian queer literature from the 1980s to the 2000s.
His doctoral project examines how queer subjects navigate the (post)modern metropolis in the post-1980 era, bringing underrepresented queer texts and writers—including Cui Zi’en, Mu Cao, Fukushima Jirō, Nishino Kōji, and Hiruma Hisao—into comparative dialogue across China, the broader Sinophone world, and Japan. Situated at the intersection of “global” queer theory and “local” East Asian contexts, his research considers how queer theoretical frameworks travel, transform, and encounter their limits across different cultural and historical settings. In doing so, his work seeks to contribute to broader conversations about queer theory and its (in)adaptability to processes of glocalization in East Asia.
Research interests:
Sinophone and Japanese literature;
Comparative literature
Queer theory;
Gender and sexuality studies;
Literary topography and spatial critics
Recent publications:
“Is Chinese Queer a Void? Cui Zi’en, Leo Bersani, and the Representations of Voids in Peach-Colored Lips.” Journal of Homosexuality, 2026. doi:10.1080/00918369.2026.2650690.
Recent conferences
“The Gay Cottages: Imagining a Queer Heterotopia in Mishima Yukio’s ‘Ai no shokei’ and Fukushima Jirō’s ‘Basutaoru’,” 18th International Conference of the European Association for Japanese Studies (EAJS), Poland (27-30 August 2026, Poznań)
“Why Women Kill and Eat: Female Cannibalism in Contemporary Sinophone Literature,” 26th Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies (EACS), Italy (21-25 July 2026, Venice);
“Abandoned Sons and Futureless Futures: Queer Anti-Futurity in Mu Cao’s In the Face of Death We Are Equal,” 122nd Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Conference, United States (20-23 November 2025, San Francisco)
