Professor Nan Zhang
Nan Zhang is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Hong Kong. She received her BS in International Finance from Fudan University, and her Ph.D. in English Literature from Johns Hopkins University. She works on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literature and global modernism. Her research interests also include cosmopolitan studies, history of political thought, aesthetics and ethics, economic history, and international finance. She has published a book on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and is completing her second monograph on modernism’s engagement with various forms of virtue. Her articles have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Modernist Cultures, Literature Compass, and elsewhere. Her new book project focuses on transmutations of British liberalism at the turn of the twentieth century. Nan Zhang is co-editor of the “Global Circulation Project (GCP)” at Literature Compass. She serves on the editorial board of the Bloomsbury Academic books series “Historicizing Modernism,” and on the advisory board of the journal Public Humanities. She is a co-founder of the Modernist Studies in Asia network (MSIA) (https://www.modernismasia.hku.hk/).
Select publications
- Civilized Individuals: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2018.
- “Selling Short or Buying Long: Financial Wars and Future Creation in 1930s Shanghai,” Modernist Cultures 20.1 (2025): 35-54.
- “Cities of Global Modernism: Introduction,” co-authored with Nicoletta Asciuto and Mae Losasso, Modernist Cultures 20.1 (2025): 1-10.
- “‘The New Economy and the Old Morality’: Reimagining a Liberal Culture in Howards End.” Modern Fiction Studies. 69.3 (2023): 393-416.
- “Global modernist studies: Asian perspectives” (co-authored with Kunio Shin), Literature Compass 20.1 (2023): 1-8.
- “Home and Wanderlust: Patriotic Wayfarers on the Path of ‘Universal Life’ in Rabindranath Tagore.” Journal of East-West Thought 8.3 (2018): 59-84.
- “La litterature mondiale et les mondes litteraires. Une perspective moderniste sur le cosmopolitisme esthetique,” in Chine France – Europe Asie: Itinéraire de concepts, eds. Michel Espagne and Li Hongtu, Paris: Rue d’ulm, 2018.
- “‘Solemn Progress’: Woolf, Burke, and the Negotiation of Virtue.” Modernist Cultures 12.3 (2017): 391–415.
Select awards
- 2021 – Visiting Fellowship at CPCE, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University
- 2020 – The 2020 Humanities Research Centre Fellowship at Australian National University
- 2019 – British Academy Seed Funding
- 2016 – Visiting Fellowship at the University of Hamburg
