IHC Pre-Doctoral Fellow: Kuan-yen Liu

IHC Pre-Doctoral Fellow: Kuan-yen Liu

Kuan-yen Liu is a Doctoral Candidate in English. His dissertation is titled Animal-Human Analogy and the Order of Things: A Comparative Study of Victorian British and Late-Qing Chinese Darwinism.

This research project will explore the cross-boundary interaction of Darwinism with philosophy, socio-political thought and literature in the Victorian period (1837-1901) of Britain and in the Late-Qing period (1840-1911) of China. The objective of this research project is to explore and compare how the animal-human analogy which is derived from evolution- a fundamental assumption of evolutionary biology-reveals an order of things in British Darwinism and Chinese Darwinism. I aim to deal with with cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary “travel” of the Darwinian animal-human analogy from the perspectives of comparative philosophy, cultural translation, intellectual thought an comparative literature.