Yu Wang

Yu’s research is situated at the intersection of Holocaust studies, memory studies, life writing, and illness narratives. Her book manuscript, adapted from her dissertation defended in 2022, examines four inaugural scholars of altruistic rescue during the Holocaust from different disciplines. Initiating the sub-field of rescue in Holocaust Studies in the late 1970s-early 1990s, each wrote autobiographies of their rescue experiences during the war while researching other people’s rescue stories. The manuscript inspects the multiple meanings of rescue and altruism at an important early stage of Holocaust studies while exploring the authors’ selfhood across various genres of their writing. 

Her current project probes how narratives of different types of suffering can meaningfully converse with one another. She approaches the question through comparative readings of scholarly autobiographers of terminal illness, aging, and grief who embarked on research of the Holocaust and the Second World War. 

Yu got her B.A. in Chinese literature from Capital Normal University (China, 2014), M.A. in East Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from Duke University (United States, 2016), and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto (Canada, 2022). Before joining Monash, she was a postdoc at the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto (2022-2023) and a research fellow in the Medicine, Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles (2024). 

Yu has designed and taught the undergraduate courses “The Holocaust in Literature” and “Genocide.” She is not currently accepting PhD students as a primary supervisor.