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Wednesdays 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

Get to know Cherrie

Dr. Cherrie Kwok is an Assistant Professor of 19th and 20th Century Anglophone literature. She is a scholar and teacher who places British Romantic and Victorian literature in conversation with literatures from the Global South (especially the Caribbean, South Asia, and East Asia). She received her PhD in English from the University of Virginia, where she was a Fellow at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation from 2020-2025.

Her first book project examines a literary theme and political concept called decadence in the Anglophone and multilingual literatures of the long nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This comparative and multilingual project has two intertwined aims. The first is to unearth a new literary history about decadent writing, anchored around two key events in the long nineteenth century: the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and the colonization of Hong Kong (1842-1997). The second is to examine how enslaved and colonized writers and their descendants in this period created their own versions of artistic and literary decadence within and against the era's imperial oppressions, while also negotiating with the complex relationship that decadence has to conservatism. The project coins the term "Duvalian decadence" to describe their work, after nineteenth-century French decadent poet Charles Baudelaire's Haitian lover, Jeanne Duval.

Related essays about her book project and her other writings have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Volupté: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, Humanities, and the German-based Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (Journal for English and American Studies). Her work has received awards and honors from the British Association for Decadence Studies in the United Kingdom and the Northeast Victorian Studies Association in the United States.