Speakers:
Péter Hajdu, Distinguished Professor, College of International Studies, Shenzhen University
Zhou Mingying, Assistant Professor, College of International Studies, Shenzhen University
Moderator:
Daniel Vukovich, Professor, Faculty of Arts, HKU
Date: Friday, December 19, 2025
Time: 4:00–6:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
All are welcome. Registration is encouraged.
https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=104259
This panel features two papers from Professors Péter Hajdu and Zhou Mingying, of Shenzhen University, College of International Studies (深圳大学, 外国语学院).
Hajdu’s paper examines the acclaimed novels The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson and Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk and uses this as a bridge leading to the “morality problem” subtending climate change and its potential redress. The climate crisis, understood with all due seriousness, implies the necessity of major material as well as moral changes to our received political-economic systems and cultures. Zhou’s paper, in turn, revisits Raymond Williams’s most influential theoretical contributions, notably the concepts of “structure of feeling”, “common culture”, and “cultural materialism”, via a reading of his theory and fiction together, most notably his novel Border Country. How does Williams enable us to think through alternative ways of thinking and living in an era of crisis?
Péter Hajdu is a distinguished professor at Shenzhen University. He is editor-in-chief of Neohelicon, a major international journal in comparative literature, and serves on editorial or advisory boards of seven international journals on literary studies. He did extensive research in the fields of comparative literature, theory of literature, narratology, and classical philology. From 2002-2009, he was a member of the International Comparative Literature Association’s (ICLA) Research Committee for East and Southeast Europe. From 2008-2014, he was a member of the standing research committee for literary theory, and from 2010-2016, he was a member of the ICLA Executive Council. He has been president of the Hungarian Comparative Literature Association since 2016, having previously served as its secretary from 2002-2012. In addition, he lectured at various universities in multiple countries and has published 7 books and more than 50 peer-reviewed articles.
Zhou Mingying has been an assistant professor at Shenzhen University since 2022. She holds a PhD in English from Lingnan University of Hong Kong, MA in English Language and Literature from Tsinghua University, and BAs in English and Economics from Peking University. Her main research interests include Raymond Williams studies, cultural studies, and sci-fi culture, and she has published nearly twenty articles in the A&HCI, SSCI, and CSSCI indexed journals. She also led a National Post-funded Project of Philosophy and Social Sciences of China, titled A Critical Appraisal of Raymond Williams’s Fiction, together with several provincial and university projects.
Dan Vukovich (胡德) is an inter-disciplinary scholar who works on issues of colonialism/imperialism and critical theory in relation to the intellectual and political history of the “China-West” relationship. He has worked in Hong Kong since 2006, after earlier stints at Hocking College and UC Santa Cruz before and after his PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana. He is currently Chair of the Comp Lit Program at HKU and has been an Advisory Research Fellow at Southeast University (东南大学) in Nanjing and a Visiting Professor of Politics at East China Normal University (华东师范大学). He is the author of three monographs, including China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC (Routledge, 2012).
