“Space Between: Women’s Writing, Travels, and Transnational Encounters from the Late 19th Century to the Interwar Period”

Monday, 12 October 2026, 10:30–11:30 a.m.

Lecture Room 102, Humanities Building, NCHU, Taichung

Dr. Klaudia Hiu Yen Lee, City University of Hong Kong

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Abstract: The second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century witnessed enhanced global connectivity with the advancement of transportation, technology and shifting geopolitical dynamics. This talk will discuss writings by female writers who had first-hand experience of Asia, and, by doing so, it seeks to explore topics relating to the entwined relationship between space, place and literary aesthetics, and the various imaginative possibilities that cross-cultural encounters engender. This talk will start with some introduction to selected women writers, including Isabella Bird (1831–1904), Lise Boehm (pen-name of Elise Giles) (1859–1921), Alicia Little (1845–1926) and Stella Benson (1892–1933), before focusing on Little and Benson, whose writings were much influenced by their Asian experiences while at the same time they also revealed various forms of tension, fissures and disjunctures that were not often recorded in colonial narratives of the Far East. By emphasizing their literary aesthetics and spatial imaginaries, this lecture will re-orient attention to the aesthetics and cross-cultural engagement of those women’s writings, such as Benson’s, that had often been overshadowed either by their contemporaries who were seen as belonging to the literary canon (such as Virginia Woolf and other high modernists in Benson’s case), or by the male-dominated colonial society and the literary marketplace during the period.

Short Bio: Dr Klaudia Lee is an Associate Professor at the Department of English, City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, periodical studies, spatiality, comparative and world literature. She has published in international journals including English Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, Journal of Victorian Culture, and Victorian Periodicals Review. Lee is the author of the monographs, Spatial Stories and Intersecting Geographies: Hong Kong, Britain, and China, 1890–1940 (Liverpool University Press, 2025), and Charles Dickens and China, 1895–1915: Cross-Cultural Encounters (Routledge, 2017). She is also the co-editor (with Sharin Schroeder) of Cities and Fantasy Across Cultures, 1830–1930: Urban Imaginaries and Transnational Encounters (Liverpool University Press, 2026), and (with Eli Park Sorensen) of World Literature: Approaches, Practices, and Pedagogy (Routledge, 2025). She is the co-founder of Transnational Urban Narratives Network and an executive council member of the Society for Global Nineteenth Century Studies. She is an associate editor of The Explicator, and a submissions editor of Victorian Periodicals Review and Journal of Victorian Culture.

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