Haoran Xia

I did my undergraduate studies in 2017–2020 in the multidisciplinary program at Bar-Ilan University’s Faculty of Humanities. I took courses from multiple tracks: Israeli studies (archaeology, history, and Hebrew calligraphy), psychology (social psychology, personality psychology, and criminology), political science (international relations, politics in the Far East, and foreign policy issues in Asia), literature (satire in Romanticism, German theater, and Utopia and Dystopia), and French and German. Among these, I was most influenced by the Utopia and Dystopia course, taught by Dr. Danielle Gurevitch.

In this course, we examined different social and literary phenomena from a modernist perspective, ranging from mandatory military service in Israel to collectivism as manifested in the Harry Potter series. We concluded that, in the context of today’s society, the terms “utopia” and “dystopia” do not represent the same ideas as in the original Greek context. Based on this development, I chose as my research project the decline of the beauty of art in a societal sense. I compared the public perspective on art in the Renaissance with the post-modern view, arguing that current modernity is suffering from a dystopian collapse in viewing beauty.

Currently, I am a freelance writer, contributing columns to digital magazines in China on the cinema (mainly about western productions) and cultural analysis (cultural phenomena in today’s China). I will start my master studies in comparative cultural analysis at the University of Amsterdam in September 2023, and I wish to continue my work as a writer on cultural topics.