Teaching Areas

I regularly instruct intermediate level seminars, which expose students to specialized topics in the discipline, such as, EN3241 Literature and Psychoanalysis, and EN 3264 In Other Wor(l)ds: Postcolonial Theory and Literature. Currently I teach the Honours seminar, EN4265 Peripheral Realism: Approaches to World Literature. I have also instructed the department’s Honours level course on Critical Theory and Literary Studies, and have devised a comparative, cultural studies seminar on twentieth-century Asian urbanism for the curriculum. I currently teach EN2266 Love’s Word: Reading across Philosophy and Literature for students wishing to advance their skills of critical reading, analysis and exposition for the major. Every year, I instruct and coordinate the large, first-year gate-way lecture, EN1101 An Introduction to English Literature. At the postgraduate level. I regularly offer EN 5253: Writing in the Aftermath; the seminar engages key topics in trauma studies across a range of historical contexts, through a selection of literary, philosophical and cinematic works.

Graduate Supervision

I invite students to work within, or at the intersections of my interests in postcolonial studies, critical and aesthetic theory, especially through Frankfurt School approaches; World Literature; the relevance of these areas to revised aproaches to modernism in the juncture of the Cold War and de-colonization; and trauma studies.

i. . Doctoral Dissertations - Main Supervisor    

 2020- Augustine Chay: ‘Emergency Culture: Cold War Decolonization and the Malayan Novel'

 2019- Li Yawen: ‘Sibling Wounds: Postcolonial Literature in Comparison with the Melancholy of Single Children in Post-reform China

2017-2022 Radhika Saraf: (co- department supervisor, Dr. Farid Alatas, Sociology, NUS) ‘The Disenchantments of Labour: Marxism, Translation and the Figurations of Minority in Colonial Bombay’ 

2015 - 2019 Tan Teck Heng: How to Read Modern Chinese Literature in English? The Women Beside/s Modernism

2014-2019 Katherine D. Ojano: ‘Opacity and Commitment in Twentieth-Century Women’s Revolutionary Writing from the Peripheries’. (Recipient of the Dean’s Fellowship for most promising original doctoral research).                                          

2012-16: Aparna Shukla. Anachronistic Histories: Rethinking Trauma and Visual Ethics in the 21st Century.

2011-16 Vasugi Kailasam: ‘Reconciling the 'Nation' through Literature and Film: Reading Post-conflict Sri Lanka’ 2011-present.

2012-14 Shalini Rupesh Jain: ‘Ecocritical Alternatives, Alternative Modernities' (co-supervised with Ross Forman, Warwick University, UK)

ii. Masters Theses (Main Supervisor), with a selection of Related Independent Study Modules 

• 2020-22 Adeline Tay Women’s Writing, Activism. and the Intimate Public Sphere in America after #MeToo 2019-22
• Augustine Chay: Emergency Culture and the War-time Novel in Malaya (awarded the Commonwealth Fellowship)
• 2018-20 Primrose: Aesthetics of Mytho-realism: The Rural in Global Chinese Eco-fictions .                                             
• 2013-15 Tan Teck Heng, 'The Left Bank and Beyond: Expatriate Writing and Intercultural Representations in the Twentieth to Twenty-First Century
• 2014-15 Benjamin Goh, Blanchot and Benjamin on Law and Literature (sem. 1); A Critical Review of Agamben's State of Exception and Legal History of Economic Migrancy in Singapore (sem. 2).  (ISM toward an MA in English Literature/for further degree, JD in Law and Literature ; ).
• 2011-2013 Lin Li:  ‘Flight of the Fragment: Badiou, Beckett and Merleau –Ponty’
• 2008-2012 Cyril Wong Yit Mun: ‘Globalisation & the Cosmopolitan Novel: An Analysis of the later novels by J.M. Coetzee & Kazuo Ishiguro’(MA ISM)
• 2008-09 Hussain Ahmad Khan:“’Blankness of Surroundings’”: Limitations of Post-Orientalism Histories for Art in the Margins of Empire” (ISM, MA History)
• 2010-2011 Muhamad Fadhil bin Abdul Rahim:  ‘Chronicles of a Palestinian Exile: The Politicisation of the Absurd through Silence and Repetition  in the Films of Elia Suleiman’ (ISM paper for study on literatures of conflict)
• 2007-11 Tan Yong Yeong:  ‘Manoeuvres in the Oeuvre: Confession in the Works of Foucault, Mishima and Winterson’ (MA thesis, incl. supervision of ISM on related topic)
• 2007-11 Nandabalan Paneerselvan: ‘Karnad's Violence: Writing in the aftermath of Colonisation’ (MA Thesis)
• 2007-09 Iyesha Baig : ‘Adorno’s Autonomous Image in the ‘Revolutionary’ Films of Tarr, Hou and Tsai’ (MA Thesis; extension of ISM paper: Adorno: ‘Society’ and ‘Autonomy’ from Aesthetic Theory and Selected Texts(ISM)
• 2004-2007  Jeremy de Chavez: ‘Masculinities/Fantasies: Zizek for a Reading of Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters’ MA Thesis. ‘The Agency of Pleasure in Slavoj Zizek’. Paper for two-semester course, ‘Directed Readings in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory’ (ISM and MA)

Current Research

I am currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled, Internal Migrations: Bodies of Labour, the Borders of Painting, and the Expanded Screen of Ranbir Kaleka.  A reassessment of Ranbir Kaleka, a pivotal if understudied figure in the history of contemporary Indian art, the study borrows  the idea of ‘migratory aesthetics’ to reassess  Kaleka's uses of video-art, as well as the current 'contempraneity' of the screen in the mode of the installation work. I am interested in how the specificities of both the medium and its location within post-Independent Indian art-history are related, in the body of Kaleka's work, to largely invisibilised histories of displacement -- in large-scale evictions via development projects or catastrophic climate chang, in vast itineraries of routinised seasonal migration between agricultural belts in Central and North West India, and, most recently to the internal migration of working people during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the book, Adorno and the Architects of Late Style in India: Aesthetic Form after the Twentieth-Century Novel (2021), I argued for the copresence of histories of decolonization, mass displacement and the foundations of subcontinental modernity through territorial division, with the crisis of post-War Europe. The arc of the study moves from late-colonial to contemporary uses of the novel in India to demonstrate how figures of forced or failed assimilation in the history of the twentieth-century novel persist into globally conversant visual art-practices in India at the turn of the millennium. Deriving its approach from an account of advancing logics of commodification and decontextualization -- a movement that also swallows the status of Western Marxism and the figure, especially, of T.W. Adorno  – The Architects of Late Style in India proposes that under conditions of advanced capitalism, logics of redundancy overtake the novel’s foundational reference-point in the nation, and associated traditions of Third World humanism, to produce altered frames of thought and sensibility. But it is also through this economy of perceptual loss and transformation – what Adorno variously identifies with works of ‘late style’ -- that ostensibly obsoleted traditions and texts produce an unanticipated actor who might encounter, anew, the figures of an unfulfilled twentieth-century.