Nach seiner Promotion in Englischer Literatur an der Newcastle University 2013 zog es Yvan Stacy hinaus in die Welt, genauer gesagt nach Asien. Nach Anstellungen als Dozent in Bhutan und Hong Kong war er zunächst als Assoziierter Professor an der School of International Studies der Zhejiang University in China angestellt und wechselte dann 2019 an die Beijing Normal University, wo er bis heute lehrt und forscht. Nun kommt er als Junior Fellow an die Professur für Großbritannienstudien von Prof. Cornelia Wächter. Im Steckbrief erzählt er in seiner Muttersprache von seiner Forschung und gibt Emfpehlungen für zeitgenössische chinesische Literatur:

Name: Ivan Stacy
Position/Professur: Junior Fellow an der Professur für Großbritannienstudien
Institut: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Facultät: Fakultät Sprach-, Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaften

What are your main interests as a researcher? Which topics do you focus on?
My main research theme is complicity, which can be defined as a secondary contribution to wrongdoing. One can be complicit in many different ways, for example by collaborating, by conspiring, by condoning, or by being culpably ignorant. I am interested in how contemporary fiction both represents and reflects on complicity, and in my previous work I have looked at the ways in which complicity through failures of witnessing – failures to see and tell – have enabled large-scale wrongdoing to occur.

I am also interested in the carnivalesque, which is a concept associated with the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin argued that medieval carnivals were a time when usual social rules were suspended, and in which voices from different levels of society mixed and interacted in ways that were not normally possible. For Bakhtin, the carnivalesque is therefore a liberating, democratic force. However, I am interested in the ways that images and rhetoric associated with the carnivalesque have, in recent years, been appropriated by populist politicians.

What was your most interesting research topic so far?
I spent a year and a half working in Bhutan, and I wish I could have stayed longer because it is a fascinating culture. I wrote an article applying the concept of the carnivalesque to Bhutanese Buddhist religious rituals, in which masks are traditionally used in sacred dances. However, two films that I discussed showed those masks enabling acts of sexual violence, so they offer an interesting critique of contemporary Bhutan, and also overlapped with my work on both complicity and the carnivalesque.

What does your current research focus on?
The theme of my fellowship at TUD is ‘Global Complicities’, and this is very much the current direction of my research. I think complicity studies would benefit greatly by expanding beyond western legal and moral models, and I hope to contribute to that expansion through my research.

Which item do you absolutely need at your workplace?
I’ve got a computer, internet connection and decent coffee, I’m usually good to go.

Do you have a favourite quote? If so, what is it and from whom?
From Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:
‘To see the devil as a partisan of Evil and an angel as a warrior on the side of Good is to accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are of course more complicated than that’.

Which book did you recently read? / Which movie/series did you watch recently?
I’ve been reading quite a lot of contemporary Chinese fiction at the moment as I live in Beijing. Zhang Yueran’s Cocoon and An Yu’s Ghost Music were both very interesting.

More information about you can be found:
I’m fairly quiet on social media but my academic profile is here: https://bnu.academia.edu/IvanStacy/CurriculumVitae