Hsinmei (May) Lin

Lecturer

Hsinmei Lin

Ph.D. English Literature, University of Washington, Seattle
M.A. English Literature, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan
B.A. English Language and Literature, Fu-Jen Catholic University, Taipei, Taiwan

Office: UW1-391
Email: hsinmei@uw.edu
Website: www.analterworld.com

I earned my Ph.D. in English Literature in 2019 from the University of Washington, Seattle, with specializations in 19th-century American poetry, 20th-century Sinophone poetry, world literature, translation studies, animal studies, and ecocriticism. Currently, I am working on a book manuscript titled “The Poetics of Worlding: Nonhuman Cartographers and the Becoming of Histories,” an interdisciplinary project which proposes alternative ways of world-building and history-making that decenter human activities via the lens of 19th-century American and 20th-century Sinophone animal-focused poems.

Teaching

I teach interdisciplinary and research writing courses in the First-Year and Pre-Major Program. My pedagogical practices focus on collaborative learning, school-life education, and community building. I seek to engage my own academic and personal interests in the courses I teach because I believe that the optimal course outcomes are predicated upon not only the collaboration and learning between the students but also those between the students and me as their instructor. It is through these kinds of organic and dynamic student-student and student-instructor relationships that I endeavor to educate students and myself on the ever-changing ways of learning and living with others via the collaborative acts of reading and writing. The themes of my courses center on the investigation of human and animal perspectives on the environment, biodiversity in composition, and connection between natural science and literature. I encourage students to create multimodal, interdisciplinary, and research-based projects that enable them to establish and build an unconventional world with their own unique perspectives. I also regularly invite students to publish their world-building projects on my website “An Alter-World: Animals, Humans, and Poetics.”

Recent Courses Taught

BWRIT 134 Interdisciplinary Writing
BWRIT 135 Research Writing

Selected Publications

Articles/Books

  • The Poetics of Worlding: Nonhuman Cartographers and the Becoming of Histories. [manuscript proposal in progress for submission to the Brill Human-Animal Studies Book Series]
  • “A World of Her Own: Mobility, Animal Subjectivity, and Geographical Scale in Dickinson’s Poetry.” [article undergoing revision for submission]
  • “Starring Nights: Whitman, Epilepsy, and Van Gogh.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. 36 (2019), 179-201.
  • “Songs Yet to Be Sung: Walt Whitman and Taiwan’s Yu Kwang-Chung.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. 32 (2015): 144-150.

Literary Translations

  • Yu Kwang-chung’s posthumous poetry collection—the English edition. (Work in progress)     
  • “A Doggerel on Novel Coronavirus.” Uyghur Collective. Web. 21 March 2020.
  • “The Universe in Perspective, Commentator, and The Birth of a Masterpiece by Yu Kwang-Chung.” Transference. 3.1 (2016): Article 26.