Siyu Xie

About Me

I am a PhD candidate at the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. My research intersects Chinese and comparative literary studies, environmental humanities, history of natural sciences, eco-philosophy, and early modern media. My dissertation project looks into how the literary circle storied their embodied relationship with the vegetal world in early modern China. It uncovers an entanglement between literary production and the documentation of the natural world. Beyond academia, I am drawn to creative practices that help us think and sense the world ecologically.

Research

Dissertation project: "A vegetal sympoetics: sharing life with plum blossom trees in the early modern China"

This project examines how plants grow out of the pages of literature in the 16th-18th centuries in China, focusing on how the literary circle leaf their words to story their relationship with the non-human world.

Research talk: "The Catalogue of Plums: The Comportments of Floral Bodies"

Department of Comparative Thought and Literature, Johns Hopkins University, April 30, 2025

Conference presentation: "Nature's Orientalism versus Productive Ambiguity"

Nature-Thinking Hopkins-Bauhaus Summer Lab on Comparative Thought, Weimar, Germany, June 21, 2025.

Conference presentation: "The Resistance to Metaphor"

American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Annual Convention, virtual, May 30, 2025.

Poetry

Flu

Water drips from my nose like tears, pattering down. I lower my head and see them clinging, droplet by droplet, to my wool coat. Black pepper churns in my stomach. The evening glow melts into a cream cake. Wearing glasses is incompatible with the mask, turning the autumn trees into Impressionism.

Beijing, 2019

Pas de chat

The dance teacher tells me to feel the air [ ] with my skin. Fill the air [ ]. The more you feel it, the more you'll shine.

Flow Cats feel air's temperature and currents, with their skin. That I have long heard— their sensory receptors. Their tails, like octopus tentacles, unfurl in the deep sea. like a vine, like a spiral, like the hem of a jellyfish's skirt, Nestling into the ocean's deepest ripples.

Locationless, dateless

inquiries, art & poetry