Helena Pan Hu

Helena Pan Hu (she/they) is a PhD candidate in English and American Literature and an EDGE Fellow at Stanford University. She received her MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College, studying the poetics of urban modernism in early twentieth-century Anglophone and Japanese literatures. Her current research cuts across modern and contemporary narrative arts, global Asian Anglophone literature, identity and identification, and race and gender in decolonial literatures. Emerging out of place-based socio-geographical research, her current doctoral project brings together such themes by closely examining immigration patterns and aesthetic production of the San Francisco Bay Area. With chapters focusing on Oakland, San Francisco, Berkeley, and San Jose, the project challenges the entrenched narratives of white settler-colonial masculinist "Manifest Destiny" that has come to define the American West, instead foreground its diasporic, multiethnic, and affect-oriented literary and aesthetic histories as alternative stories that make sense of the American West.

In the upcoming academic year as the Dee Fellow, she is doing archival work and developing her thesis on the relationship between infrastructures (basic, transient, industrial, media) and aesthetic productions in and around San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and San Jose.