Nicole is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh. Her project centres on a sudden cluster of biofictions published within a decade or so from the end of last century that feature Virginia Woolf as the main protagonist-subject. Under the broad framework of experimental life-writing, she studies them thematically via such lenses as illness narrative, image-text intersectionality, and the modernist culture of conversation. She is on the reader panel for James Tait Black Prize Biography Section and is the editor and chief Chinese translator of the anthology Literary Medicine: Brain Diseases and Doctors in Novels, Theatre, and Film. She is a research member at the Bio-Health Narrative Research Centre at the Southern Medical University (SMU, PRC), and engages with the design of volunteer training programme for the Bio-Health Story Sharing Centre at SMU. Before her PhD programme, she taught both Literary Translation to English Language undergraduates as well as English Language to medical students at SMU.
In 2021, Nicole initiated a collaborative project between The Polyphony and the Bio-Health Narrative Research Centre, SMU, in the hope of creating intercultural dialogue and introducing leading-edge concepts and theories of medical humanities to China. She is particularly interested in discussing ideas for articles that address following areas:
• Life-writing pieces exploring language’s possibility to write illness and pain
• Stereotypes and stigmas of illnesses across cultures
• Humanities disciplines in healthcare education curriculum
• Narrative psychology and narrative therapy