Chan Wai Charles Wong
Charles holds a BA in English from the University of London and a MA in English Studies
from Freie Universität Berlin. Before joining the Research Training Group at FAU
Erlangen-Nürnberg, he had doctoral proposals accepted at the University of York and at
Freie Universität Berlin, where he was also awarded the Elsa-Neumann-Stipendium.
Project: Affective Alienation: Crises, Disaffection, & Contemporary Fictions
This project turns to 21st-century Anglophone fictions to look at disaffection as an affective mode of crisis management opposed to empathy and nostalgia, two sentimental modes which have become mainstream and ubiquitous in recent cultural and sociopolitical discourse amidst crises. While empathy and nostalgia can be broadly characterized by a respective attachment to utopic (forward-looking) and retrotopic (backward-looking) impulses, disaffection is counter-positioned as a form of detachment. Its refusal to commit to a direction other than to immerse in a general state of dissatisfaction or discontent with the current situation can be described as heterotopic in gesture, since it opts to remain at the present site of incompatibility (Foucault 1984; Berlant 2021), the same spot of bother causing the unhappiness in the first place. By refusing codified forms of sentiments however, I argue that disaffection allows for a different set of feelings to emerge, one that may help us to feel the structural contours of contemporary crises instead of veiling them with derivative platitudes. In gesturing towards the ambivalent and the unfeeling, I thus also seek to push the boundaries of what sentimentality entails, hoping to open up new affective grounds for sentimental literature beyond immediate identification and pathos.
Conference Talks
“Crises on the Margins: Situational Genres in Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World (2017).” 35th Postgraduate Forum (PGF) of the German Association for American Studies (GAAS), “Crisis & Resilience in American Literature, Culture, History, and Politics.” Leipzig University, Germany, 08 November 2025.
“On the Inconvenience of Contemporary Literary Disaffection.” 13th Summer Academy of the Bavarian American Academy (BAA), “North American Narratives of Crisis & Repair, Past & Present.” Goethe-Institute Montréal, Canada, 18 July 2025.
“‘Floating Sideways:’ Lateral Aesthetics & Post-Neoliberal Subjects in Anglo-American Millennial Novels.” The British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies “What Happens Now” (BACLS-WHN) Biennial Conference. University of Stirling, United Kingdom, 12 June 2025.
Academic Activities & Workshops
- Presented PhD chapter at the Research Colloquium of Prof. Dr. Sabine Schülting (English Philology: Cultural Studies). Free University of Berlin, Germany, 07 January 2026.
- Chair of Panel “Disrupting the Genre and Conventions of the Novel” at the 52nd Conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies (AAAS), “Ruptures, Fractures, Discontinuities: Troubling American Studies.” University of Vienna, Austria, 04 October 2025.
- Presented PhD project at the Research Colloquium of Prof. Dr. Sabine Schülting (English Philology: Cultural Studies). Free University of Berlin, Germany, 25 June 2025.
- Chair of Panel “Uncertain Affects” at The British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies “What Happens Now” (BACLS-WHN) Biennial Conference. University of Stirling, United Kingdom, 11 June 2025.