“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” — Karl Marx, “The Communist Manifesto”
Clay Chou
Assistant ProfessorAsian Studies
Yu Chih (Clay) Chou is an Assistant Professor in the Center for the Study of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Goucher College. He completed his doctorate in Modern Chinese Literature in 2020 at the University of Oregon. Prior to his doctorate studies, Clay received his master’s degree in Chinese with focuses on pedagogy and Teaching Chinese As a Second Language in 2010 from San Francisco State University. Clay’s current research interests lie in modern Chinese literature and its cultural production, with special interests in the modern conception of children and its related evolutionary and eugenic ideas as well as family reform discourse in the context of the Chinese nation building project. He is working on a monograph project that examines the tensions within the triangular dynamic relationship of modern individual, family, and nation in the context of Chinese nation building through the lens of a developmental eugenics narrative in Chinese modern literature from 1895 to 1966 to rethink the genesis of the Cultural Revolution. Clay currently teaches Chinese language courses (CHI 110, 120, and 130) and courses on Chinese cinema and literature (CHI 201: Modern Chinese Culture Through Film and Literature, CHI 3xx: Sex and Gender in Traditional Chinese Literature, and CHI 3xx: Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese Literature).
Publications
Translation: “A Glimpse at Shanghai Literature” with Professor Roy Chan in Lu Xun, “Jotting Under Lamplight.” Edited by Eileen Cheng and Kirk A. Denton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017) pp 225-237.
Conference Papers & Panel Participation
“Imagined Mothers: A Dialogic Betrayal of Spiritual and Material Motherhood in Republican Women Writers’ Stories,” presented at 2020 MCAA Online Conference, Co-Hosted by a Consortium of MCAA-affiliated universities, October 16-18, 2020
“The Unappealing Future: The Paradox of the Modern Family Man of that May Fourth Family Revolution Era,” presented at 2019 AAS-ASPAC Conference, Saint Mary’s College, Moraga, CA, June 7-9, 2019
“Striving for Modern Womanhood and Saying No to Motherhood: Women Fiction Writers Repudiating Women’s Role in Political Narrative and Women’s Images in Periodicals in Republican China Period (1911-1949),” presented at the 2017 AAS-SWCAS Conference, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, November 17-18, 2017
“Rejecting Motherhood: Women’s Childrearing Complex in Republican Literature,” presented at the 2017 University of Colorado Boulder Asian Studies Graduate Association Conference, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, February 3-4, 2017
“Metaphor Usages Analysis of Responding articles to the Taiwan’s ‘Sunflower Student Movement’ on the News Websites in Taiwan,” presented at the Second International Conference of The American Pragmatics Association, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, October 17-19, 2014
Academic or Professional Associations
Association for Asian Studies
Other Professional or Scholarly Activity
Summer 2022 Visiting Research Scholar at National Taipei University of Education (Taipei, Taiwan)
Translator. Forever Chinatown documentary press packet (co-translated from Mandarin with Michelle Crowson) excerpted in Danielle Seid, “Forever Her Chinatown: Where is My Grandmother in Chinese American Feminist Film History?” in Feminist Media Histories 5.1 2019