Hsinmei Lin (May)
Ph.D English
I was born and raised in Taiwan, where I obtained both my bachelor’s and master’s
degrees in English Language and Literature. In 2014, I moved to Seattle to attend
the English Ph.D. program at the University of Washington. I earned my doctorate in
2019, with specializations in 19th-century American poetry, 20th-century Sinophone
poetry, world literature, translation studies, critical animal studies, and environmental
humanities. I also have a passion for translation/interpretation and am currently
working on a Chinese-English translation project of a poetry collection.
The classroom is my happy place—as a teacher, I feel energized and inspired when learning with and from my students. My pedagogical practices focus on collaborative learning, school-life connection, and community building. I design my curricula to be inclusive of multilingual and multicultural populations by approaching writing as an act of identity-(trans)formation, relation-building, and collective creation. When teaching both writing and literature courses, I encourage students to create multimodal, interdisciplinary, and exploratory projects that enable them to establish a personal, unconventional world with their own unique perspectives. I also regularly invite students to publish their world-building projects on my website “An Alter-World: Animals, Humans, and Poetics.”
When I am not teaching, reading, or writing, you can find me exploring the PNW outdoors with my partner and our dogs, gardening, researching new dishes to cook, or simply soaking up the sun (if the weather permits)!