Renren Yang began his doctoral studies in the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford in the fall of 2011. He was born and raised in Xiangtan, China and received his M.A. and B.A. in English Literature and a B.L. (Double Degree) in Sociology from Peking University. He has been interested in hero and heroism in world literature, theories of authorship, literary genres (especially the novel and the drama), and literature in the age of digital culture. With a concentration on modern and contemporary Chinese literature and culture, his studies also attend to the late 19th and early 20th century British, American and French prose fictions. Currently he is working on a dissertation on the transformation of authorship in contemporary China with the rise of digital and social media.

Languages
Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, French, Spanish, Japanese​

Publications
(Co-author) “Between Languages, Hither or Thither?—A Study of the Use of English and Academic Identities of Chinese Scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences,” in Linguistic Research (Issue 7), Institute of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics of Peking University, ed. Beijing: Higher Education Press, 2009: 181-90.

Conference Presentations

“The Lure of the Tarim River: A Disappeared Internet Novel and its Performative Authorship” in AACS (American Association of Chinese Studies) 57th Annual Conference, Houston, October 9-11, 2015.

“ ‘Buried Alive in History’: Poetics and Ethics of Time-travel Historical Narrative in Contemporary China” in ACLA 2015 Annual Conference, Seattle, March 26-29, 2015.

“The ‘Misappropriation’ of the Knight-errant Imagery in Ding Ling’s and Yu Dafu’s narrative of Sexualized Hero(ine).” The Third Annual East Asian Studies Symposium, Dept. of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Stanford, June 5, 2014.

“Probing a Unified Consciousness through Impressionistic Text,” the panel “Impression of Beauty on the Self” in Impression & Object-A Conference on Critical Theory. Department of Comparative Literature, Graduate Center, City University of New York, March 28, 2014.

“Legacy Hunting: Superstition as Indigenous Articulation and Performance,” the panel “The Constellation of Capitals and Capital in Chinese Literature” in ACLA 2014 Conference. New York University, March 20-23, 2014.

“Shen Congwen’s ‘Border Town’: an Aestheticized Jungle,” Ignite Talks, Urban/Jungle DLCL Graduate Student Conference, Stanford, October 26, 2012.

“To Seek and To be Sought: Transcripts Intersection in Zhao Zhenkai’s ‘13 Happiness Street’,” the First Annual East Asian Studies Symposium, the Dept. of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Stanford, June 2012.

“Literary Depiction and Film Adaptations of the Balcony Scene in Romeo and Juliet,” The Twelfth Annual British Graduate Shakespeare Conference, the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, Stratford-upon-Avon, June 2010.

“The Philosophy of ‘Unity of Being’ in Yeats’s Poems,” Conference on “Sino-Irish Relations: 1979-2009,” the Embassy of Ireland and Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing, December 2009.

“Between Languages, Hither or Thither?—A Study of the Use of English and Academic Identities of Chinese Scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences,” The 2^nd International Conference on Language Learning, Griffith University and Peking University, Beijing, April 2009; a paper awarded the 2^nd Prize in the 16^th “PKU Challenge Cup” Academic Competition.

“‘The Dead’: A Comparative Study of the Ambivalent Images in the Story and the Film,” Symposium on James Joyce, The Institute of Comparative Literature and World Literature at Peking University, Beijing, November 2007; an essay awarded the 2^nd prize in “James Joyce Essay Competition” sponsored by the Embassy of Ireland in 2007.