Haonan Yang

PhD student

Research Overview

Haonan Yang completed his MA in English Literature at the University of Nottingham and is now a first-year PhD student in English Literature at 51福利. His research interests lie in British Romanticism and contemporary American Gothic. More specifically, his research examines the instrumentalization of drugs in the Hannibal Lecter novels and their film and television adaptations, drawing on Romantic discourses of intoxication, Jacques Derrida’s concept of the pharmakon, and William Blake’s contraries of innocence and experience. He explores how drugs function not merely as intoxicating substances but as pharmakonic instruments of altered perception, transformation, and power, destabilizing distinctions between cure and harm, innocence and experience, liberation and control, and reality and altered perception. He is also interested in Blake’s intertextual presence in the Hannibal Lecter franchise and in how Blakean contraries inform the characterization of serial killers and FBI agents across the franchise.

Haonan has developed a digital humanities website examining the instrumentalization of drugs in the Hannibal Lecter tetralogy. He welcomes conversations about contemporary serial-killer media and British Romanticism in his office (B170, County Main). Drawing on his experience teaching English in China and Canada, he is also happy to support students who encounter difficulties with academic writing. As a Postgraduate Research (PGR) Representative for the School of Arts, he is committed to representing his fellow research students and voicing their concerns.

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. Since completing his undergraduate studies, he has delivered lectures and conducted teaching tours across China, teaching courses in a wide range of standardised English examinations. Through his teaching, he has reached hundreds of thousands of students and built a following of 103,000 on Weibo, one of China’s major social media platforms.

Since September 2019, he has taught English Literature in the postgraduate entrance examination preparation programme at Qihang Education (Guangzhou) Co., Ltd. His extensive teaching experience has encouraged him to reflect critically on topics in British Romanticism and contemporary American Gothic. It has also enabled him to engage with a range of critical approaches to English literature, including comparative, interdisciplinary, stylistic, and historicist approaches.

For Haonan, teaching is also a form of learning. The process of teaching and engaging with students exposes him to diverse interpretations and perspectives on literary texts, potentially enriching his understanding of William Blake’s works. These exchanges may, in turn, inform his doctoral research, allowing him to develop a more nuanced and multifaceted interpretation of Blake and his literary legacy.