Hardy Stewart 

Hardy Stewart is a PhD Candidate in Chinese Language at the University of California, Berkeley, where he works on Taiwan literature and poetry. Stewart asks how classical Chinese poetry traveled to Taiwan and changed or was changed by the island context. His doctoral dissertation, “Peripheral Poetics: Hong Qisheng 洪棄生 (1866–1928) and Taiwan at the Edges of Empire,” studies the life and works of a self-proclaimed “man beyond the sea” 海外人 to consider the experience of peripherality (in space and time) and the formation of local style around the turn of the century. It posits that the distance between the island Hong called home and the continent he called heartland—both a proverbial distance he studied and a physical distance he sailed—inspired in Hong’s poetry a particular attention to the imperium’s fringes, which shaped his expression of provenance and the record of his world.  

Research interests: Qing poetics; examination culture; place