Dihao ZHOU is a scholar of speculative arts and thoughts on sciences and the environment in modern China. He received his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University in 2023, and taught at Sichuan University before coming to HKU. His dissertation, “Overcome by Speed: Acceleration and the Transformation of Chinese Science Fiction, 1954–1996,” situates the careers and works of the PRC’s first generation of sci-fi writers within the accelerating revolutions in politics and science of their time. The dissertation traces a crucial shift in Chinese sci-fi’s perception of futurity and planetarity, arguing that the genre’s initial fever for mastering nature and advancing toward a communist destination of history gradually yielded to an anxious awareness of impending crises driven by globalized modernization. The dissertation demonstrates that Chinese sci-fi’s planetary consciousness does not merely stem from the country’s recent alignment with global capitalism, but reflects China’s socialist and third-world formulations of science and modernization shaped by the Cold War and its aftermath. 

At HKU, besides revising his dissertation to a book, Dihao is also working on a new project on the notion of deep time in modern China through investigating fossils and cryptids. He also serves as Research Assistant Professor affiliated with the School of Chinese.