Adele Xiyu Hu is an M.A. student in Literary Studies at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests include literature, science and technology; science fiction and speculative fiction; posthumanism; feminist and queer theory; and digital humanities. Across these areas, she is particularly interested in how literature constructs and unsettles the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, and how scientific and technological imaginaries reshape ideas of agency, embodiment, and otherness.

​

Under the supervising of Professor Anne M. Thell, her current research examines human–nonhuman relations in Margaret Cavendish’s literary and natural-philosophical writings, with particular attention to materialism, human exceptionalism, and hierarchies of life and agency. More broadly, she is interested in the changing literary imagination of human–nonhuman relations from early modern natural philosophy to contemporary speculative fiction, including representations of artificial intelligence, robots, hybrid beings, and other forms of technologically mediated life.

​

Hu also works with digital and qualitative research methods. Her previous projects have combined corpus-assisted literary analysis, Python-based text processing, qualitative coding, social-media research, and semi-structured interviews. Her work on gender and linguistic positioning in Jane Austen’s fiction has been presented at conferences on applied linguistics and digital humanities, while her fieldwork and public-facing writing have addressed language education in Uganda, African diasporic food cultures in Hong Kong, and migration and digital media in Singapore.

​

Her work has appeared in African Spear and Mirror Lake. She is currently exploring ways of bringing literary studies into closer conversation with science and technology studies and computational approaches to culture.