Peizhen Wu

she/her/hers

Postdoctoral Fellow

Curriculum Vitae

Dissertation

Techno-reciprocity: Cyberpunk across East Asia and the West; Work-in-progress Seminar Presentation (October 27, 2026): From Cyberpunk to Gendered Cyber-Pop: Reading Chinese Sci-fi Web Novels through Digital Humanities

Education

PhD in Literary Studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA (2021–2025)
MA in Literary Studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA (2019–2021)
BA in English Language and Literature (World Literature and Culture), Tsinghua University, China (2015–2019)

Selected Publications

  • Wu, Peizhen, and Michael Drout. "'The Course of Actual Composition': Analysis of Some Aspects of the Revision History of The Lord of the Rings Using 'Lexomic' Digital Methods." Tolkien Studies, vol. XXI, 2024.
  • Wu, Peizhen. "Teaching Trans Studies through Fan Fiction in College English Classrooms." Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 39, 2023.
  • Sharma, Aniruddha, Yuerong Hu, Peizhen Wu, Wenyi Shang, Shubhangi Singhal, and Ted Underwood. "The Rise and Fall of Genre Differentiation in English-Language Fiction." CHR 2020 Proceedings, vol. 1613, 2020.
  • Spencer, Stewart, Yinqing Zhu, Peizhen Wu, Wei Zhao, Clovis Gladstone, Hoyt Long, Anatoly Detwyler, and Richard Jean So. "Comparative Literature and Digital Infrastructure: Constructing the 'Republican China Periodicals Corpus (1918–1949)' Based on Philologic4." Journal of Digital Humanities, vol. 1, no. 1, 2020.
  • Wu, Peizhen. "'Shengmu' Versus 'Dream Girl': A Large-Language-Model-Assisted Comparative Analysis of Gender Critique in Chinese and English Reviews of Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem Trilogy." Forthcoming in Science Fiction Studies, vol. 54, no. 1, 2027.
  • Wu, Peizhen. "Strategies for the Intercultural Communication of Chinese Science Fiction: A Digital Humanities Study of Online Reviews of Waste Tide." Under review at Contemporary Literary Criticism.

Teaching

  • University of Rochester—Debates in Digital Studies (ENGL 561, Fall): Core graduate seminar exploring critical frameworks, media theory, and ethics in digital humanities; Computational Methods in the Humanities (ENGL 564, Spring): Lab-based graduate seminar in advanced computational research, including text analysis, visualization, and coding; Mentor, Meliora Digital and Interdisciplinary Fellows Program: Advises PhD fellows across the humanities on the digital/computational components of their dissertations; leads recruitment and selection of incoming fellows
  • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign—Topics in Lit and New Media Studies (ENGL 253): Undergraduate seminar examining the intersection of fan studies and media studies; Postcolonial Literature (ENGL 285): Undergraduate seminar exploring 20th-century postcolonial literature in conjunction with 19th-century imperial novels; Writing and Research (RHET 105): Undergraduate writing course taught since 2019, including a "Generative AI and Rhetorical Analysis" session; Writers Workshop Consultant: Provided writing tutoring since 2021, with over 99% positive feedback
  • Beijing Y-English Education Consulting Co., Ltd.—Teaching Assistant, academic English reading and writing (2016–2019): Over 200 hours of instructional support

Honors

  • Consistently included on the university-wide List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  • Dissertation Scholarship, English Department, University of Illinois (2024–2026)
  • Research Grant, Fan Fiction Project, English Department (2021)
  • Summer Scholarship, English Department, University of Illinois (2019–2026)
  • Graduate Scholarship, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Illinois (2019–2020)
  • Meritorious Winner (Top 8%), Mathematical Contest in Modeling (2018)

Bio

Peizhen Wu is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Rochester's Humanities Center. She holds a Ph.D. in Literary Studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where her dissertation, "Techno-reciprocity: Cyberpunk across East Asia and the West," used literary/new media studies and computational methods to examine the transnational influence of Cyberpunk fiction, anime, and games. Her research combines Digital Humanities with transnational literary and new media studies, analyzing how race, gender, and posthumanism circulate between Western and East Asian popular culture. Her work has appeared in Tolkien Studies, Transformative Works and Cultures and Journal of Digital Humanities, with forthcoming pieces in Science Fiction Studies. At Rochester, she teaches "Debates in Digital Studies" and "Computational Methods in the Humanities" in the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities program and mentors PhD fellows across the humanities through the Meliora Digital and Interdisciplinary Fellows Program.

Fields and Interests

  • Digital Humanities: computational methods (NLP, LLMs); cultural analytics
  • Transnational literary and new media studies: science fiction; fan studies; audience reception studies; East Asian and American popular culture