Xinyuan Lyu

I am a second-year PhD student in Classics and was born and raised in Shanghai, China. I graduated from Cornell University with a B.A. in Classics and College Scholar Program (magna cum laude) in 2023. My main research interests are Greek literature and theory. I am especially drawn to studying the conceptualization of the body, and its role in the construction of meaning in narratives of all kinds; more specifically, I want to explore literary (re)presentations of/through sensory experiences – or, in fact, the limitations of a representational mode of interpretation – as well as the translatability of contemporary theoretical frameworks such as media studies and new materialisms. Recently I have also had the opportunity to start to explore classical reception, where my training in Classical Chinese allows me to examine texts produced at the intersection of Chinese and Greco-Roman literary, philosophical and cultural traditions.

My undergraduate honor thesis, titled “Sight and the Voyeuristic: Mediation, Narratives, and Plural Realities”, attempted to understand vision as a constitutive rather than instrumental medium of experience in the narrative episodes in Herodotus and the Odyssey, as well as in an installation digital art work, the Pure Land series (2012) by Jeffrey Shaw, which curates a part of the Buddhist paintings and the interior environment of Cave 220 of the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang, Gansu Province China, roughly around the early Tang Dynasty.

• BA Classics, Cornell University, 5/2023