Dr Minying Huang

I am a College Lecturer in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at St John's College, as well as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute. Prior to teaching at St John's and in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, I completed a DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages, funded by a Wolfson Foundation Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities. I also hold a BA in Spanish and Arabic from the University of Oxford and an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto.

My creative writing is informed by my academic research and interests in diaspora, imagetext, visual discourses of race and gender, and the politics of seeing. My poems and creative non-fiction have appeared in fourteen poems, wildness, Palette Poetry, Electric Literature, Gutter, The Los Angeles Review of Books’ China Channel, Articulations for Keeping the Light In (eds. Rachel Long and Jacob Sam-La Rose, flipped eye publishing, 2022), and elsewhere. In 2021, I was shortlisted for the James Berry Poetry Prize for emerging writers of colour and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets.

I have delivered creative workshops for educational and cultural organisations, including St John’s College and San Mei Gallery, and I am interested in continuing to explore the role of creative practice in research and education.

Teaching

I teach Arabic, Latin American, and Comparative Literatures across the University of Oxford, and I am responsible for organising the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies degree at St John's College. This academic year, I am delivering undergraduate lectures, tutorials, and dissertation supervisions in modern Arabic literature, as well as postgraduate lectures and seminars in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation.

In previous years, I have taught a range of modern literary topics on the Spanish degree and run access workshops and taster sessions for sixth-form students interested in studying Modern Languages. I have also provided study skills support to first-year undergraduates at Lincoln College and taught English literature to visiting students at St Catherine's College.

My research explores the cultural production of migrant communities in the Global South, with a recent focus on the modern and contemporary poetry of the Arab diaspora in Latin America. Key areas of interest include modernist and avant-garde poetics, Arabic and Latin American literatures, transnational intellectual history, postcolonial theory, diaspora journalism, cultural constructions of race and gender, and the relationship between poetry and the visual arts.

My doctoral thesis (2024) examined twentieth-century Latin American Arab poetry, situating first- and second-generation immigrant texts in relation to aesthetic and political dialogues across the broader Americas, Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA), and Europe. It argued that the importance and specificity of Latin American Arab poetry have historically been obscured by its position within an uneven global landscape. Drawing on diverse Spanish-, Arabic-, and English-language sources, my project offered a new narrative of Arab Latin America while also critically interrogating culturally essentialist approaches to South-South and minority literatures.

Publications

'A Thousand and One Laylas: The Politics of Narrative Embedding in Laila Neffa's Ais', Amerika [Online], 27 (March 2024) https://doi.org/10.4000/amerika.18922

Awards and Distinctions

• Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities, Wolfson Foundation (2019-2022)
• Barbican Young Poet, Barbican Centre (2019-2022)
• Mapleton-Bree Prize for Work in the Creative Arts, St John's College, Oxford (2015, 2022)
• Faculty of Arts and Science Fellowship, University of Toronto (2018-2019)
• Faculty of Arts and Science Tuition Fellowship, University of Toronto (2018-2019)
• Centre for Comparative Literature Top-Up Award, University of Toronto (2018-2019)
• Junior Fellow Ondaatje Bursary Award, Massey College, Toronto (2018-2019)