CModS Postgraduate Forum Launch

We will kick things off on Thursday 15 May at 6pm in the Bowland Auditorium (B/S/005). This will include our first PGR-led presentations and Q&A session followed by refreshments and a chance to chat.

The CModS Forum is delighted to be joined by Jocelyn Xu from the Department of History and Dion Everett from the Department of English and Related Literature to deliver presentations and answer questions about their research. Abstracts and bios for both below!

We hope you’re able to join us for our launch and are incredibly excited to host some excellent PGR presentations going forward!

Please submit an abstract and bio on our CModS PGR Forum Google Form if you wish to present at a forum event in the future.

Jocelyn Xu: “Documenting the Unspoken: Post-Conflict Memory of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery in Chinese Films”

During World War II, the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces forced women into sexual slavery (known as “comfort women”) across occupied territories during both the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and the broader Asia-Pacific War (1941-1945). This paper employs Hayden White’s concept of “historiophoty”—the representation of history through visual images and filmic discourse—to analyse two contrasting documentary approaches to the comfort women survivors' stories. It argues that independently produced films more effectively capture the personal, gendered experiences of survivors, while government-funded productions tend to subsume individual narratives into broader national memory.

The paper focuses on two documentaries released in 2017. Guo Ke’s Twenty-Two, an independently produced film that achieved record-breaking box office success in China, focuses on survivors' daily lives and personal narratives, aiming to destigmatize survivors and challenge their historical portrayal. In contrast, Zhang Jianning’s Exposing the Comfort Women System, a government-sponsored production aired on CCTV-4, documents systematic sexual abuse and presents survivors primarily as historical evidence, emphasizing national collective memory rather than personal narratives.

Through interviews with both directors and analysis of their motivations, this paper examines how Guo’s work challenges traditional gender norms and concepts of female chastity and brings comfort women survivors into the public sphere, while Zhang's documentary serves as a formal historical record, using survivors' testimonies to prove the existence of systematic wartime sexual slavery and tend to subsume individual narratives into broader national memory.

These divergent conceptual frameworks challenge the stereotypical narratives of memory, which often depict survivors as tools used by state actors, historians, or activists in battles over historical interpretation. This paper contributes to the use of historiophoty at the intersection of gendered violence, personal memory, and public memory. It also offers new insights into the complex relationships between individual trauma, national memory, and the political aspects of historical documentation in post-conflict societies.

About the speaker: Jocelyn Xu is a PhD candidate in History at the University of York and a non-residential scholar with the USC Shoah Foundation. Supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities (WRoCAH), her doctoral research employs oral and intellectual history, as well as public and women’s history, to explore the agency of ‘comfort women’ survivors in mainland China after the Second Sino-Japanese War (1931–1945) and the Asia-Pacific War (1937–1945). She contends that narratives of suffering are not shaped by knowledge of historical events. Instead, these narratives rely on stereotypes and simplified assumptions to determine who becomes visible and who fades from view. The amplification or silencing of voices depends on how a conflict and its contributing factors are perceived at any given time. To effectively address conflict-related sexual violence, acknowledging complexity is essential to bringing about real change, redistributing shame, and restoring agency to those affected.

Dion Everett: The Lives of "The Secret History": Haunting, Heroes, and the Collapse of Linear Time

Dark academia, birthed by a small community of Donna Tartt fans in the mid-2010s Tumblr space, became during the COVID-19 pandemic something of a phenomenon. This genre, and its accompanying subculture, promoted wiling away endless hours in study, with freedom from financial concern or worry about future plans. And, for an audience struck by stay-at-home orders, it offered the perfect platform to live out the idealised academic fantasy.

This paper offers an analysis of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) which hopes to reexamine her place within the 1990s literary canon by showing that her text operates within classically masculine genres but innovates and complicates them in such a way that The Secret History spawned its own genre. By tracing the lineage and inspirations of the text, I attempt to understand The Secret History’s influences, and analyse the narrator, Richard, and his foil, Henry, within the context of the observer-hero narrative, the Gothic doubled-self, and the Byronic hero. I then offer an examination of how the novel's literariness gives it a sense of non-time, equating historical products and events and collapsing the distinctions between the classical, the contemporary, and everything in between. I will read this collapsed distance, and the novel's subsequent popularity in the twenty-first-century, as reflective of the cultural haunting that we are experiencing – the haunting of capitalism, and the haunting possibility of what might have been – which has created a genre in which the aspirational lifestyle does not distinguish between past and present, and encourages artistic education across time periods.

About the speaker: Dion Everett is an MARes student whose main interests lie in the influences of the past on the literature of the present. He reads in a wide range of genres, and has a soft-spot for tragedies which can still make you laugh. He is very interested in the current education system, and is working for the Careers and Placements team on a project to help A&H PGRs with understanding their transferable skills and careers options outside of academia.