About
I am a postdoctoral researcher in French nineteenth-century literature and culture, specialising in the work of Émile Zola (1840–1902). Other interests include the body, myth, Medical Humanities, and languages. I have taught poetry, fiction, critical theory, and the adaptation of the novel in both the French and English departments at Birkbeck College (University of London, UK). Education
PhD: ‘Myths of Empire, Evil, and the Body in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart’
MA: Modern French Studies
BA: Literary Studies (English and French) Publications
Wong, K Y, 2025,
‘Medicine and mythology in Émile Zola’s La Curée (1872): The tragedy of Renée’,
Journal of Romance Studies, 25(3): 485–507
Wong, K Y, 2024,
‘Introduction: The Symbiosis of Language(s), Literature, and the Medical Humanities’,
Open Library of Humanities, 10(1): 1–22
Wong, K Y,
‘Making and Remaking the History of Medicine with European Languages and Literature’ (blog post 16 February 2024)
Wong, K Y, 2021,
‘Illness, Aesthetics, and Body Politics: Forging the Third Republic in Émile Zola’s La Faute de l‘abbé Mouret’,
Open Library of Humanities, 7(2): 1–19
Wong, K Y,
‘Fallen Empire: Degeneration in Émile Zola’s La Débâcle‘,
The Polyphony, (blog post 16 December 2021)
Wong, K Y, 2021,
‘Degenerate Bodies: Max Nordau’s Degeneration and Émile Zola’s La Débâcle’, Critical Medical Humanities special issue,
Essays in French Literature and Culture, 58: 15–31
Wong, K Y, 2014, ‘The Phantasmagorical City: Haussmann’s Paris in Zola’s
Nana and
L’Assommoir’, in
Rethinking the Real — Fiction, Art and Theatre in the Time of Émile Zola: Papers from the London Colloquium 2013, ed. by Valerie Minogue and Patrick Pollard (London: The Émile Zola Society), pp. 159–66
Projects
Part of AHRC project
‘Reading Bodies: Narrating Illness in Spanish and European Literatures and Cultures (1870s to 1960s)’ (1 October 2023 to 31 March 2025).
Guest editor,
‘The Pathological Body: European Literary and Cultural Perspectives in the Age of Modern Medicine’,
Open Library of Humanities special issue (2024).
Organised
‘The Pathological Body from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present: European Literary and Cultural Perspectives’ symposium (IMLR, London, UK, 20 September 2019).
‘Sickness and Cure in Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart Novels’ (talk during Birkbeck Arts Week (21 May 2019).
Co-organised
‘Migrating Texts’ translation, adaptation, and subtitling workshops (IMLR, London, UK, 2014–19).
