Jeffrey Mather
Biographic Data
| ID | 643522 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jeffrey Mather |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jeffrey |
| FAMILY NAME | Mather |
| SIGNATURE | MATHER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | City University of Hong Kong |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8153-5730 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 28 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 10 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Slow comics
This essay investigates how comics, through their capacity for ‘slowness,’ can challenge readers to reflect on the far-reaching effects of resource extraction in a globalised world. Focusing on Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020) and Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (2022), both set in Canada, I analyze how comics’ formal properties represent the disruptive effects of extractive practices such as mining, forestry, and fracking. Thes…
Graphic journeys
While existing research has highlighted the benefits of reading and analysing comics in fostering critical thinking and multimodal literacy, fewer have examined the pedagogical value of involving students in actively creating their own comics. Beyond developing technical and artistic skills, comics creation engages students in the affective dimensions of learning – those aspects of education that foster collaboration, emotional reflection, and po…
Global movements in Hisaye Yamamoto's short fiction
This study focuses on the short fiction of Hisaye Yamamoto and explores how formal techniques, generic patterns, and thematic ambiguities associated with modernism “travel” and are enacted within specific social contexts. Through a close reading of two of Yamamoto's stories—“Seventeen Syllables” and “Wilshire Bus”—I argue that her fictionalized rendering of internment, racism, and social restriction shed light on the constraints that peripheral “…
Poetry in the World
This essay focuses on the editor and writer Harriet Monroe, whose writings on China are unexamined within modernist literary history. Through a discussion of her essays and travel writings, this study argues that Monroe’s understanding of cross-cultural poetic influence was based on a pragmatist worldview, one that stands in contrast to philological and essentialist views of cultural and linguistic difference. Unlike Ezra Pound and other Imagists…
Hygienic Modernity and Han Suyin’s Destination Chungking
This essay examines the work of Han Suyin, an author whose writings offer contested views on the formulation of Chinese nationalism from a transnational and multilingual perspective. While I refer to some of Han’s later works, including her novel “A Many Splendored Thing” (Han, Suyin. 1952. A Many Splendored Thing. London: Jonathan Cape), the primary focus of this study is Han’s first major publication, “Destination Chungking” (Han, Suyin. 2017 […
Twentieth-Century Literary Encounters in China
From the travel writing of the eccentric plant collector and Reginald Farrer, to Emily Hahn’s insider depictions of bohemian life in semi-colonial Shanghai, to Ezra Pound’s mediated ‘journeys’ to Southwest China via the explorer Joseph Rock – Anglo-American representations of China during the first half of the twentieth century were often unconventional in terms of style, form, and content. By examining a range of texts that were written in the f…
Hong Kong Comics
At different points of Hong Kong’s historical development, sequential graphic narrative art has served as an influential mode through which artists have explored sensitive subjects and expressed re
Response to Gary Okihiro, “Of space/time and the pineapple”
Sinophone studies
Terms such as anglophone, francophone and lusophone have long been used to refer to language within or outside of a “home” country, yet until fairly recently the term sinophone has not appeared in
Botanising in a Sinocentric world
This article will discuss the writings of Robert Fortune (1812–80), a Scottish plant collector who travelled in China during the 1840s and 1850s. After the First Opium War (1839–42), trade with China flourished and as European travellers, merchants, and missionaries moved inland, long-held views about China were both confirmed and contested. Fortune's travel books provide important insights into changing British attitudes towards China during thi…
Sinophone studies
Terms such as anglophone, francophone and lusophone have long been used to refer to language within or outside of a “home” country, yet until fairly recently the term sinophone has not appeared in
Botanising in a Sinocentric world
This article will discuss the writings of Robert Fortune (1812–80), a Scottish plant collector who travelled in China during the 1840s and 1850s. After the First Opium War (1839–42), trade with China flourished and as European travellers, merchants, and missionaries moved inland, long-held views about China were both confirmed and contested. Fortune's travel books provide important insights into changing British attitudes towards China during thi…
Response to Gary Okihiro, “Of space/time and the pineapple”
Sinophone studies
Terms such as anglophone, francophone and lusophone have long been used to refer to language within or outside of a “home” country, yet until fairly recently the term sinophone has not appeared in
Hong Kong Comics
At different points of Hong Kong’s historical development, sequential graphic narrative art has served as an influential mode through which artists have explored sensitive subjects and expressed re
Twentieth-Century Literary Encounters in China
From the travel writing of the eccentric plant collector and Reginald Farrer, to Emily Hahn’s insider depictions of bohemian life in semi-colonial Shanghai, to Ezra Pound’s mediated ‘journeys’ to Southwest China via the explorer Joseph Rock – Anglo-American representations of China during the first half of the twentieth century were often unconventional in terms of style, form, and content. By examining a range of texts that were written in the f…
Hygienic Modernity and Han Suyin’s Destination Chungking
This essay examines the work of Han Suyin, an author whose writings offer contested views on the formulation of Chinese nationalism from a transnational and multilingual perspective. While I refer to some of Han’s later works, including her novel “A Many Splendored Thing” (Han, Suyin. 1952. A Many Splendored Thing. London: Jonathan Cape), the primary focus of this study is Han’s first major publication, “Destination Chungking” (Han, Suyin. 2017 […
Poetry in the World
This essay focuses on the editor and writer Harriet Monroe, whose writings on China are unexamined within modernist literary history. Through a discussion of her essays and travel writings, this study argues that Monroe’s understanding of cross-cultural poetic influence was based on a pragmatist worldview, one that stands in contrast to philological and essentialist views of cultural and linguistic difference. Unlike Ezra Pound and other Imagists…
Global movements in Hisaye Yamamoto's short fiction
This study focuses on the short fiction of Hisaye Yamamoto and explores how formal techniques, generic patterns, and thematic ambiguities associated with modernism “travel” and are enacted within specific social contexts. Through a close reading of two of Yamamoto's stories—“Seventeen Syllables” and “Wilshire Bus”—I argue that her fictionalized rendering of internment, racism, and social restriction shed light on the constraints that peripheral “…
Graphic journeys
While existing research has highlighted the benefits of reading and analysing comics in fostering critical thinking and multimodal literacy, fewer have examined the pedagogical value of involving students in actively creating their own comics. Beyond developing technical and artistic skills, comics creation engages students in the affective dimensions of learning – those aspects of education that foster collaboration, emotional reflection, and po…
Slow comics
This essay investigates how comics, through their capacity for ‘slowness,’ can challenge readers to reflect on the far-reaching effects of resource extraction in a globalised world. Focusing on Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020) and Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (2022), both set in Canada, I analyze how comics’ formal properties represent the disruptive effects of extractive practices such as mining, forestry, and fracking. Thes…
Art (8 works) · Literature (7 works) · History (6 works) · History (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · China (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works) · Archaeology (3 works)