Mengqi (Mercy) An is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. Her research spans Chinese-Sinophone literature, Russian-Russophone literature, ecocriticism, modernity and modernism, and borderland studies. Her dissertation project, titled "Between Nature and Cultures: Literature of Manchuria in Chinese and Russian Languages, 1910s-1940s," examines writings in and about Manchuria (Northeast China) during a period of cultural clashes and unprecedented human impact on nature. She is particularly interested in the interplay between discourses, knowledge, and aesthetics related to the natural environment as played out in literary texts. Her research troubles many boundaries, including those of nation-states, geography, material-discourse, and human-nonhuman.