COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Viola Bao (she/they) is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literary Studies and English. Her work focuses on the political and poetic histories of Asian and African diasporas and East African postcolonial writing, especially in Pan-African networks, transnational social movements, and the New Left of the 1960s–70s. At the intersection of multiple sites, her research draws on Marxist frameworks of political economy and uneven development, aesthetic theory, and decolonial thought to explore ideas of cultural revolution and cultivation via the global circulation of Third Worldist thought. Her dissertation traces engagements with Mao's concept of a "people's aesthetic" across a variety of minoritarian genres, exploring how it catalyzed formal innovations that unsettled established divisions of labor between artist and audience and generated experiments in polyphonic narrative forms. One of her side projects focuses on family abolition and the international division of social reproductive and sexual labour through the 20th-century emergence of the transnational adoption industry, with particular attention to the politics and poetics of return and kinship in the work of Korean and Chinese adoptee writers and artists. Together with Anna Zalakostas and Professors Kalyan Nadiminti and Harris Feinsod, she has co-organized the Workshop in Transnational Cultural History at Northwestern. 

Viola's work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including South Atlantic Quarterly, Philological Quarterly, and Versepolis Review. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the Sweden-America Foundation, and the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University, and was recently recognized with the ACLA Horst Frenz Prize. She is also a literary translator working between Chinese, English, and Swedish, and a regular contributor of literary criticism to Sweden's largest daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter.