As a first-year student in the Residential College, Shao-Chi Ou was drawn to a pair of classes with strangely enticing titles: Global Vampires and Body Writing. Both were listed in the Department of Comparative Literature, and he took both courses, which fascinated Ou with questions about translation and adaptation—not only of world languages, but of ideas.
“I wanted to explore … approaches to arts and ideas from different parts of the world,” Ou says.
Through the intensive language program in the RC, he traveled to Paris for an immersive semester, achieving fluency in French. He continued to be fascinated by the way that different perspectives emerge through cultural exchange, along lines of art, technology, mythology, gender roles, and of course, language.
Ou observed the ways that language translation bridges divides and began investigating how concepts might be translated through different media. Translation, Ou found, holds the potential to make our world more accessible and to bring people together.
Back in Ann Arbor, Ou studied how popular novels have been adapted into different genres and types of media, including woodblock paintings, plays, TV shows, movies, and even video games and animé. He read African American poets and practiced creative writing. As an LSA Honors Summer Fellow, he studied the ways that disability and gender roles were understood in late imperial China through a close reading of a 16th century play, a novel, and an ancient mythological figure. At the heart of all of this work was an emphasis on how a single story might journey across many different ways of telling.
Bridging Digital Worlds
Ou wanted to use his expertise in language, media, and translation to make technology work better for people. He was accepted into LSA’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) in fall 2022 as a member of the Translational Networks research team to do just that.
“We used [design program] Figma to help improve the user interface of an educational video game. It was my first time doing something related to UI/UX, and it was interesting to think about how to teach and think about literature through digital tools,” Ou says of the yearlong project.
He also learned a lot about mentorship during his participation in UROP. Postdoctoral fellow Ali Bolcakan and Professor Christi Merrill “were great mentors and gave me a lot of support when I was applying to graduate schools,” he says. These relationships informed the kind of teacher Ou hopes to become one day.
Ou pursued even more practical applications for his comparative literature skills. During the summer of 2023, he completed an internship with the U-M Library to work on a digital app that teaches users how to navigate the campus library building complex, a place that Ou describes as “very confusing.”
Working on a team with two other undergraduate students and two mentors, Ou used Figma to develop a gamified training module introducing users to the Shapiro and Hatcher Libraries and showing them how to access various library services.
Ou continued on as a research scholar with Bolcakan after UROP, and even presented his work at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in March 2025.
After graduation, Ou will begin to pursue a Ph.D. in comparative literature at the University of Oregon, with the aim of becoming a literature instructor and a public scholar. He’ll bring the lessons about mentorship and cultural exchange that he learned from LSA coursework and his internships with UROP and the library system to his graduate studies and teaching plan. He intends to keep reaching a broad audience with his work, improving people’s lives with his skills of language and media translation.
“I hope that I will be able to deliver my thoughts and research in non-textual forms and digitally,” he says, in order to bring as many people as possible a little closer together.
Photography by Madison Thompson
