Rate My Professor Lorraine Wong

Dr. Lorraine C. M. Wong is a Senior Lecturer in the Chinese Programme within the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Otago, part of the Division of Humanities. She holds a BA in English from the University of Hong Kong, an MPhil in Sociology from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University. Her interdisciplinary background informs her research on the history of script reforms in modern China and their intersections with modern Chinese literature and literary criticism. Wong examines language rights in China and beyond, comparative script politics, and the culture and history of Hong Kong outside colonial and national paradigms. Her interests extend to literary Esperantists of Chinese and non-Chinese origins, Sinophone literature, modern and contemporary Chinese literature, film, and popular cultures across mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora. She also explores modern Chinese history, Western intellectual discourses on China, linguistics in Western Marxism, and Romanizations and script reforms in non-Western contexts. Currently, she is completing a book manuscript tentatively titled Script and Revolution in China's Long Twentieth Century, which investigates the transformation of the Chinese script, its ties to the communist revolution, and evolving views on phonocentrism, logocentrism, and script as a political and aesthetic medium.

Wong has supervised several postgraduate theses, including PhD dissertations such as Yu Zhang’s “Chinese Spatial Poetics and Global Space from Liang Qichao to Gary Snyder” (2023), Xiaomin Chen’s “The Networks of Contemporary Chinese Long Poems: Scale, Tradition, and World Literature” (2021), and Suzanne Zexuan Sun’s “Paradoxical Paradises: The Poetic and Lived Utopias of James K. Baxter and Gu Cheng” (2019), as well as MA and Honours works. Her publications include “Poetics of loss in Esperanto: Mao Zifu writes in his wheelchair” (2024) in The Poetics of Grief and Melancholy in East-West Conflicts and Reconciliations, and “Encounters between Esperanto and Chinese: Julio Baghy, Ba Jin, and Armand Su” (2021) in The Intercultural Role of Esperanto. She has delivered public lectures such as “Entering history through translation: Qu Qiubai and the Chinese script” (2022) at Victoria University of Wellington and “Becoming history: Qu Qiubai and the Chinese script” (2022) at the University of Sydney. Wong teaches courses including CHIN 334, CHIN 335, CHIN 243/343, and CHIN 244, incorporating topics like urban and rural imaginations in Chinese literature, youth culture, gender politics, socialist culture, and world literature. She welcomes postgraduate students in Chinese Studies and Comparative Literature aligned with her research areas.