Qiyu Chen | Humanities and Social Sciences | SIU

Qiyu Chen is a scholar of 20th- and 21st-century African and African diaspora literatures with comparative and transnational perspectives. Her research explores various comparatist methods for engaging with global black cultural productions, particularly through the lenses of global Cold War studies, print culture studies, the intellectual tradition of Black internationalism, genre studies, postcolonial/decolonial studies, and Africa-China literary relations. She received her dual-title Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and African Studies from Pennsylvania State University in 2024 and her B.A. in English and History (with honors) from Tsinghua University, Beijing, in 2019.

In 2017–2018, she was a visiting undergraduate student at Harvard University. Her peer-reviewed work has appeared in the Journal of the African Literature Association (JALA) on Kiswahili theatre and in the Journal of World Literature on the politics of canonization, as well as on the circulation and reception of African literature in Socialist China. She has another forthcoming article on Kiswahili theatre and the Cold War. Currently, she is working on two article projects: one examines Afro–Chinese encounters in recent African novels, and the other recovers the forgotten history of independent Black presses in the 1960s and 1970s that practiced non-aligned publishing during the Cold War. Although her research centers on print culture, Qiyu’s interest in Africana literatures and cultures has also been shaped by a personal, amateur appreciation for music. From Peking Opera to Afrobeats, from Mandopop R&B to Indigenous African musical traditions, she remains drawn to questions of cross-cultural exchange and fusion in literary and cultural studies. At SIUC, she has taught courses on Black feminist thought and African feminism. She welcomes students interested in these and related topics to reach out.