👀 projects & publications

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my work moves between the visual avant-garde, utopian and dystopian literature, historical pain, and everyday dark humour — at times returning to a distinctly Wildean aestheticism

i am interested in how beauty, monstrosity, money, diplomacy, surveillance, and technocratic power reorganise what becomes visible

About

Sia X. Yang 杨晓雅 is a bilingual writer-researcher as well as a weirdly lucky person.

She is currently based in Sydney while working with SOAS University of London to further develop her grantswomanship.

She is the recipient of:

Please contact via email only, many thanks. 📮 dr.xiaoya1222@gmail.com

Since 2018, I have been on an extended career break, thanks to the births of Thomas and Myfanwy. My deepest ambition is to remain a playful mum.

Academia is a paradise for someone who mistakes neglect for freedom. I entered it over a decade ago, consoled by the thought that not being able to drive would be the least of my dysfunctions. After over seven years of intellectual hibernation and professional near-death, my publications returned in 2025.

I spent a year (2016-17) as a visiting scholar in Early Modern European History at the University of Oxford, where I was, with complete sincerity, repeatedly mistaken for a Japanese high school girl. I later became the inaugural — and possibly terminal — winner of the Judith Neilson Scholarship (2018-23), awarded through a global competition, and completed my PhD in Art History at the University of Sydney. The period established my reputation as an askhole and coincided with my chaotic debut as a mum, leaving me with the unshakable conviction that my most dependable skill is breastfeeding.

You only get one life. I’ve always loved animals and monsters, so I thought I’d have a couple of my own — one boy and one girl, ideally. Job done. Then came the real problem: how to raise them.

I do miss those days when my babies were moving inside me — slow turns, sudden kicks, little hauntings under the skin. That bizarre hormonal happiness wiped out the all-day nausea like a glitch in the system. And for someone who started life with an A cup, I breastfed with genuine enthusiasm — two children, two years each — four glorious years of unexpected boob prosperity before everything quietly retired, shrank back to modest A, lopsided, and surrendered to gravity.

Spoiled by supervisors who retired over a decade ago, I remain effortlessly thick-skinned. My work has since been recognised with the Australian Academy of the Humanities’ fearsomely competitive Travelling Fellowship (2024) — not bad for a rookie. It afforded me a ten-day return to London and Oxbridge to showcase my Australian English, followed by a granny-sponsored detour to Tokyo for anime idol worship.

Early in 2014, I was selected for the Harvard-Yenching–Tsinghua Advanced Research Program (and halfway through, I defected to the wild artists). Before relocating to Sydney — where I would officially immigrate into my imagined ‘wild, wild Australia’ as a jobless Global Talent — I worked as a junior research slave for one year at the School of International Studies, Zhejiang University, my alma mater.

Zheda 浙大 — lying beside the romantic West Lake, perpetually ranked third in China (the forever ‘other’ to the Tsinghua–Peking couple, seductively proud of its irreplaceable position) — was also where I grabbed my PhD in Comparative Literature in 2015. Those years were solitary and, in retrospect, improbably calm: multiple projects, two male chinchillas, and a self-imposed exile in the Beijing suburbs, with no sense that I was already quietly training for a more intricate manoeuvre — one that would later acquire a sociological name: run 润.

A bonus musical skill: I was an ungifted child modern Guzheng 古箏 player.

My high school besties still believe I fulfilled my dream of becoming an anime artist.

I speak less than most men and am allergic only to others’ boredom.

I’ve, at last, made peace with Reviewer 2.

…

Eastwood, Sydney

October 2025