Tingting Hui is a university lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society.

More information about Tingting Hui

Fields of interest

• Critical theory
• Postcolonial studies
• Contemporary art and literature

Research

My PhD project, Melodramas of the Tongue, explores and disentangles the relationship between language and body. I close-read a series of theoretical, philosophical, and literary texts that dramatize or reflect on the implications of speaking with an accent. I propose that the figure of the accent holds the key to rethinking literature as the invention of a singular voice which mobilized and entices the body. Because accent, with its distinctive melody and intonation, persistently draws one’s attention to a vocalizing mouth that swallows and drops, such an image gives rise to a dramatic scene of speaking, which puts literature face to face with a primitive and regressive force of consumption and absorption. Whereas the ideal of the literary voice is often upheld as pure, sublime, and without accent, the image of a “flawed” body – mouth open, tongue loose, voice tampered with an odd and foreign accent – keeps coming back in literary works.

Curriculum vitae

2020 Ph.D. in Literary and Cultural Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands

2014 M.A. cum laude in Media Studies: Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, Leiden University, the Netherlands

2012 B.A. in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language (TCSL), Northwest University, China

Grants and awards

2019 Honourable Mention of the 2019 Horst Frenz Prize, American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA)

2016 Young Scholars Excellence Award, the Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies (MESEA)

2015 Ph.D. Fellowship, awarded by Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA)

2014 Second Prize for the sixth Piao Mu Essay Competition in Europe, Chinese Education Foundation in the Netherlands