Wenbo Chang

Lecturer
Chinese Language Coordinator

After teaching at The Ohio State University and Georgia Institute of Technology, Wenbo Chang is a lecturer of Chinese language and literature in the Department of Comparative Literature and Intercultural Studies at the University of Georgia. Her primary research area is premodern Chinese drama, its role as a potent intermediary between popular and elite cultures, and its intersection with ritual, power, gender, and cultural studies. Her research interests also include intellectual history, religious studies, and narrative of the strange. Besides her research, Wenbo is dedicated to Chinese language pedagogy and technology, with decade-long experience of teaching Chinese language at all proficiency levels. 

Selected Publications:

Guo Yingde, Wenbo Chang, Patricia Sieber and Xiaohui Zhang, ed. How To Read Chinese Drama in Chinese: A Language Companion. Columbia University Press (2023). 

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/how-to-read-chinese-drama-in-chinese/9780231209571 

 

Wenbo Chang. “Performing the Role of Playwright: Jia Zhongming’s sanqu Songs in the Supplement to The Register of Ghosts.” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, volume 8:1 (2021): 59-88.   

Abinash Dash Choudhury

Graduate Program, Teaching Assistant

Abinash is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature and Intercultural Studies at the University of Georgia, Athens. His research explores theories of mysticism with a particular focus on Christian and Hindu mystical traditions in South Asia between the 16th and 18th centuries. Centering his inquiry on the region of Odisha, he examines how devotees in both traditions articulated their spiritual experiences and negotiated their religious identities through their self-representation.

His broader research interests include autobiography studies and literary historiography, through which he investigates how individual and collective narratives of devotion are constructed, archived, and interpreted. He is also critically engaged with how colonial, orientalist, and Western epistemologies have shaped the reception, representation, and circulation of mystical texts and traditions.

Working across Hindi, Odia, Bangla, and Sanskrit, he  brings a multilingual and interdisciplinary approach to his study, contributing to broader conversations in comparative mysticism, theology, and intercultural religious studies.

Education:

Abinash Choudhury received his BA in English from Delhi University and went on to complete his MA in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata.

Asian Language Placement Tests for Fall 2022

Placement tests for Asian languages will be held during office hours the first week of classes. If you are interested in taking a Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Vietnamese language class in the fall and need a placement test, you can contact the following instructors to set up an appointment.

Chinese Language 1000-2000 classes, please contact Zhiwen Hu at zh47446@uga.edu . For Chinese Language 3000-4000 classes, please contact Anqi Liu at anqi.liu@uga.edu

**Please contact Dr. Karin Myhre for information on CHNS 4110/6110 at kmyhre@uga.edu

Ali Ahsan

Graduate Program, Teaching Assistant

Ali Ahsan studied his MA in Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and MPhil in Comparative Literature from Ambedkar University Delhi. His MPhil thesis was on the role of minor languages in the making of literature in Southwest India and is titled, "Minor Literatures: Two Novels on the Bearys".

 

His areas of interest include anti-caste writings, comparative literature and religion, literatures of the sea, the craft of fiction, translation (practice), and theories of language. 

 

Alexander Fyfe

Assistant Professor
Director of Graduate Studies

Dr. Alexander Fyfe received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and African Studies from the Pennsylvania State University in 2019. Prior to joining UGA, he taught at the American University of Beirut and the University of Edinburgh. While his primary focus is modern African literatures, he also teaches in the areas of postcolonial literatures, world literature, and critical theory.

Dr. Fyfe's research is concerned with the relations between politics and literary form in modern African literatures. His book, Writing the Noncolonial Self: Modern African Literatures and the Politics of Subjectivity, is forthcoming with the University of Virginia Press in 2026. The manuscript received the Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Award from the American Comparative Literature Association in 2025. His articles have appeared in College Literature, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and elsewhere. He has edited special issues of African identities (2020), The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry (2018, with Rosemary Jolly), and Comparative Literature Studies (2025, with Rosemary Jolly. With Madhu Krishnan, he co-edited the volume African Literatures as World Literatures (2022, Bloomsbury Academic Publishing).

Selected Publications:

“Introduction: Reading African Forms Simultaneously.” Co-written with Rosemary Jolly. Comparative Literature Studies. 62.2, 2025, 167-183.

 

“Es’kia Mphahlele and the Literary Project of African Humanism.” College Literature. 52.2, 2025, 276-306. 

 

“Video Games in Selected African Novels: Playing Intermediality in Manifold Ways.” Journal of the African Literature Association. 19.1, 2025, 115-130.

 

“Beyond the Liberal Subject: Susan Kiguli and the Lyric Poem in 1990s Uganda.” (Invited). Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. 26.3-4, 2024, 553-574.

 

African Literatures as World Literature, co-edited with Madhu Krishnan. Bloomsbury Academic Publishing. 2022.

 

“Infrastructure and the Valences of the Literary in Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 63.4, 2022, 500-512. Winner of the African Literature Association’s Abioseh Porter Best Essay Award in 2024.

 

“‘Reading and Writing... Loudly’: Ikhide R. Ikheloa, Online Criticism, and African Literary Studies.” Social Dynamics. 47.1, 2021, 154-171.


 

“Marxism and African Literary Studies Today.” African Identities 18.1-2, 2020, 1-17.

 

“The Archival Politics of the Postcolonial Special Collection: A Case Study in Literary Value and Amos Tutuola.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 50.2-3, 2019, 137-161.

 

“Wealth in Fiction: Animism, Capitalism, and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road Trilogy.” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5.3, 2018, 318-337.

 

“The Textual Politics of the Land in the Writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa.” Research in African Literatures 48.4, 2017, 78-93.

 

“Universalism and the Specificity of the Literary in Frantz Fanon’s ‘On National Culture’”. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 19.6, 2017, 764-780.