Yueqi Wu

• 2023-present PhD, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK
• MA European Literatures, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany
• Exchange Programme MA English/Film Studies, King's College London, UK
• BA German Language and Literature, Southwest Jiaotong University, China

Yueqi Wu is a PhD student from the Shakespeare Institute at University of Birmingham. She earned her MA in European Literature from Humboldt University of Berlin, which included a year abroad at King's College London. She has published two academic articles and presented her research at international conferences, including the German Shakespeare Association Conference, the Asian Shakespeare Association Conference, the British Shakespeare Association Conference and the Chinese Shakespeare Association Conference.

In addition to her academic work, she is an accomplished international theatre and media professional, with films screened at multiple international festivals. Her stage experience includes performing in several Shakespeare Institute Players’ productions, Twelfth Night (Sir Andrew Aguecheek) and As You Like It (Adam and Phoebe). She also portrayed Du Liniang in an English verse adaptation of The Peony Pavilion, translated by Professor Huang Bikang and directed by Emily.C.A.Snyder, toured Fuzhou and Peking University in October 2025.

In film, she is currently creating a sci-fi docu-fiction short film trilogy. The first two films - Apocalypse Later (2023, Germany) and 2024: A Swiss Odyssey (2025, Switzerland) - are complete, while the third is in pre-production. She is also developing the script for her first feature-length film.

Since women were originally excluded from the early modern English stage and the Eastern Shakespeare adaptations have normally been assessed by the Anglocentric standards of Shakespeare interpretation, the woman and the East have long been the figuration of otherness in the Shakespeare scholarship. My study aims to reverse this power relation and explore what Shakespeare looks like in the gaze of the “Other”. As the second largest and the only all-female Chinese opera, Yue opera has produced ten Shakespeare adaptations in the last eighty years or so, the most among all Chinese regional operas. By combing textualanalysis, performance studies and field research, this PhD project examines Yue opera Shakespeare adaptations from both gendered and postcolonial perspectives.