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Haonan Yang
PhD studentResearch Overview
Haonan Yang’s research interests lie in British Romanticism and contemporary American Gothic. More specifically, he explores how Romantic drugs, Jacques Derrida’s concept of the pharmakon, and William Blake’s contraries of innocence and experience shaped the instrumentalization of drugs in the Hannibal Lecter novels and their film and television adaptations. He examines how drugs function not merely as substances of intoxication but as pharmakonic technologies of altered perception, transformation, and power, destabilizing oppositions between cure and harm, innocence and experience, liberation and control, and reality and altered perception. Blake is a significant intertextual presence in the Hannibal Lecter franchise, and Blakean contraries, particularly those of innocence and experience, inform the characterization of serial killers and FBI agents across the franchise. Haonan has also developed a digital humanities website on the instrumentalization of drugs in the Hannibal Lecter tetralogy. Haonan is happy to chat with anyone interested in contemporary serial-killer media and British Romanticism in his office (B170, County Main).
Web Links
Haonan Yang's Digital Humanities Project on the Hannibal Lecter Franchise:
Haonan Yang's Online Lectures on Shakespeare and Victorian Gothic (delivered bilingually in English and Mandarin Chinese to Chinese-born Canadian high school students):
Qualifications
MA in English Literature from the University of Nottingham
Career Details
Haonan Yang has accumulated 14 years of English teaching experience since 2011. He has mainly been carrying out lecture tours all over China and teaching courses about various standardized English tests since he completed his undergraduate studies. He has harvested 103,000 followers on Weibo, Chinese Twitter, by teaching hundreds of thousands of students. Since September 2019, he has been teaching the course English Literature at the Department of Postgraduate Entrance Exam Training in Qihang Education (Guangzhou) Co., Ltd. This teaching experience makes him think deeply about research topics in British Romanticism and contemporary American Gothic, and also has enabled him to familiarize himself with diverse research approaches towards English literature including comparative approaches, interdisciplinary approaches, stylistic approaches, and historicist approaches. Teaching is learning—the actual teaching process and interaction with students may help him absorb more diverse perspectives of William Blake’s works, contributing to the complexity and subtlety of his PhD thesis.