Shun Yin Kiang
Scholar, poet, connector, brave ally, friend and deeply missed.
A native of Hong Kong, Shun immigrated to the United States at
age 18, where he worked at his family’s restaurant and taught
himself English, before going on to receive his Ph.D. in English
literature from Northeastern University in Boston.
One of his favorite quotes and the title of his dissertation was
“Only connect!” from Howards End by E.M. Forster. It was also a
guiding principle for how Shun lived his life — to connect our
outer and inner lives, the personal and professional, the passion
and the prose, creating a full human experience.
Shun Yin Kiang passed away at age 46 from complications due to
pancreatic cancer on January 25, 2026.
Resources
Bibliography
Kiang, Shun Yin. (2025).
“I am the torn seam of two worlds”: Ernestine Hayes’s Alaska Native Memoirs, Indigenous Storywork, and New Forms of the Global South. The Global South, 17(2), 101–118.
Kiang, Shun Yin. (2024).
Diaspora, Modernism, and Black Masculinities in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement. Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies (Print).
Kiang, Shun Yin. (2022).
Introduction: Contextualizing the Anglophone Novel. The Global South, 15(1), 1–9.
Kiang, Shun. (2019). Human Intervention and More-Than-Human Humanity in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau. 10.1007/978-3-030-14042-7_11. Victorian Environmental Nightmares (pp.207-226)
Kiang, Shun. (2017). Prostitution, Pawnshop, and Property: Everyday Life as a Colonized Woman in Shu-Ching Shih’s City of the Queen: A Novel of Colonial Hong Kong. The Global South, 11(1), 100–120.
Kiang, Shun Yin (2016). Failures that Connect; or, Colonial Friendships in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Ariel, 47(3), 123–148. https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2016.0027
Kiang, Shun Yin. (2016). “Friendship; or, Representing More-Than-Human Subjectivities and Spaces in JR Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip.” Creatural Fictions. Edited by D. Herman. pp. 127–148.
Conference
Presentations
“Possibilities and Problems: Contextualizing the Anglophone Novel.” Panel Chair. Annual MLA Convention. Chicago, IL. January 2019.
“World-Making and Anglophone Fiction.” Paper Panel. Panel Chair. NeMLA Convention 2018. Philadelphia, PA. March 2018.
“Magical Thinking, Colonial Violence, and Self-Preservation in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night.” SAMLA Conference. Atlanta, GA. November 2018.
“On The Necessary Risks of Teaching Minor Postcolonial Literature as World Literature.” Roundtable discussion. NeMLA Convention. Baltimore, MD. March 2017.
“‘Thou art of the Jungle and not of the Jungle’: Mowgli and the Mediation of the Animal-Human Divide in R. Kipling’s The Jungle Books.” Annual MLA Convention. Philadelphia, PA. January 2017.
“The Nonhuman Turn in 19 th and 20 th -century British children’s literature.” Special Session. Panel Chair. Annual MLA Convention. Philadelphia, PA. January 2017.
“More-Than-Human Publics in Nineteenth-Century English Literature.” Special Session. Panel Chair. Annual MLA Convention. Austin, TX. January 2016.
“Animal Friendships and the Undoing of Human-Centric Notions of Being and Becoming in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willow.” PAMLA Conference. Portland, OR, 2015.
“Marginal Sentiments and Relations in Shih Shu-Ching’s City of the Queen: 2
A Novel of Colonial Hong Kong.” NeMLA Convention. Toronto, ON. May 2015.
“Friendly Feelings: Anticolonial Subjectivity and Space in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India.” ACLA Conference. New York, NY. March 2014.
“Rearing Neverland: Motherhood as Colonial Social Glue in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.” ACLA Conference. Toronto, ON. March 2013.
“Queerness, Friendship, and Self-Representation in J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip.” NeMLA Conference. Boston, MA. March 2013.
“Friendship Matters: Other Sentiments and Spaces in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India.” Simon Fraser University Graduate Student Conference. Vancouver, BC. June 2012.
“The Production of Bourgeois Sentiments and Colonized Bodies in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng.” Northeastern University EGSA Conference: “Raw Material.” Boston, MA. March 2011.