Ren Jiyuan is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. She received her M.A. from the University of California, Davis. Her areas of interest include Greek philosophy, post-modern theories, and 20^th century Chinese intellectual history and literature. Her dissertation investigates the subjectivity in the post-revolution Chinese novels around 1985 to early 1990s, particularly how the centrifugal consciousness from Mao Discourse is displayed through narrative devices such as humor and parody, and how individual writing deviates and modifies the collective trauma through strategic ways of individual agency. She was awarded teaching excellence by the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures in 2023. Currently she is teaching CHIN-221.