Overview
Liling Luo is a Ph.D. student in Romance Studies at Cornell University. Her research lies at the intersection of gender and sexuality studies, women’s writing, and narratives of social mobility in 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literature. She is particularly interested in how grammatical and syntactic experimentation and the interplay between French and Creole languages reconfigure narrative subjectivity.
Before coming to Cornell, she received a B.A. in Philosophy from Fudan University, where she studied theories of subjectivity in the works of Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault. She also studied philosophy at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. She later earned an M.A. in French Literature from Sorbonne University, where she investigated the relationship between the visual arts and nineteenth-century literature from a historically grounded perspective. Her master’s thesis examined the literary representation of artworks in Théophile Gautier’s L’Orient, focusing on how they mediate between material reality and aesthetic imagination and shape the poetics of his prose.
Alongside her academic work, she is translating Pauline Peyrade’s L’âge de détruire, winner of the 2023 Prix Goncourt du premier roman, into Chinese. As an assistant editor, she has also contributed to Chinese editions of Jean Genet’s Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, Giorgio Agamben’s L’uomo senza contenuto, and Terry Eagleton’s The Real Thing: Reflections on a Literary Form.