I received my PhD from the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick in 2016, and I am currently an Assistant Professor of World Literature at Kanagawa University, Japan. My doctoral research was funded by a three-year Chancellor’s International Scholarship from Warwick. I have also held postdoctoral and visiting fellowships at Warwick’s Institute of Advanced Study and the Department of Japanese Studies at the National University of Singapore. My work opens the fields of postcolonial studies, World Literature, and Victorian studies to the study of transnational popular culture, while bringing the close attention to detail that is characteristic of literary criticism to bear on the analysis of popular cultural texts such as Japanese manga. Work stemming from my research has appeared in the peer-reviewed journals Textual Practice, Neo-Victorian Studies, Mechademia, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

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My book project, Empire of Culture: Neo-Victorian Narratives in the Global Creative Economy, examines representations of Victorian Britain in a wide array of contemporary cultural texts and practices, both “literary” and “popular,” from four geographical locations: Britain, the United States, Japan, and Singapore. By analysing cultural materials ranging from A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession and its Hollywood film adaptation to Lolita fashion and the Lady Victorian manga series, this monograph draws on contemporary narratives that look back on Victorian Britain to uncover the postcolonial politics of cultural commodity production, export, and consumption in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We often think of reading historical fiction, watching period dramas, going sightseeing, and other kinds of leisure as mere entertainment, yet these activities have become central to the global economy and are in fact – as this book argues – profoundly informed by the trans-imperial networks and structures of power engendered by an earlier wave of globalisation in the long nineteenth century.

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In my teaching, as in my research, I am committed to close reading both literary and popular cultural texts from a global perspective. Courses I teach/have taught include "Introduction to World Literature," "The British Empire in East Asia: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Perspectives," "Singapore Fiction and Film," and "Introduction to Cultural Studies."

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On a personal level, I enjoy reading and drawing comics, which I also use as a pedagogical tool in my classes.

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Contact details

Email: waiyee-loh@kanagawa-u.ac.jp

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