After completing his PhD in English Literature at Newcastle University in 2013, Yvan Stacy was drawn out into the world, especially Asia. After positions as a lecturer in Bhutan and Hong Kong, he was first employed as an Associate Professor at the School of International Studies at Zhejiang University in China and then moved to Beijing Normal University in 2019, where he continues to teach and conduct research to this day. Now he joins Prof. Cornelia Wächter's Chair of British Cultural Studies as a Junior Fellow. In the profile he talks about his research and gives recommendations for contemporary Chinese fiction:

Name: Ivan Stacy
Position/Chair: Junior Fellow at the chair of British Cultural Studies  
Institute: Institute of English and American Studies
Faculty: Faculty of Linguistics, Literature and Cultural Studies

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