Teaching Areas

Recurring NUS Modules:

• EN3222 (lecture/tutorial): The Eighteenth-Century Novel
• EN4222 (honours): Topics in the Eighteenth Century (Material Cultures)
• EN5241 (grad seminar): Literature and New Worlds, 1590-1750
• EN4251 (honours): Jonathan Swift
• EN4222 (honours): Topics in the Eighteenth Century (Science and Literature)
• EN3227 (lecture/tutorial): Literature and Philosophy

Recently Supervised ISMs:

• "Motion in the Poetry of Erasmus Darwin"
• "The Microscope and Distorted Vision in Behn, Cavendish, and Shadwell"
• "Truth in Fiction: Fielding's 'Contrary Method'"
• "Imagining Asia(s): Travel Writing and the Fictional East in the Eighteenth Century and Today"
• "Reading Pains: The Labor of Reading in Pope, Swift, and Gay"
• "Mathematics and Literature from Newton to Carroll"
• "Suicide in Contemporary Southeast Asian Fiction"
• "Women Writing Men in the Early Novel"

Recently Supervised Honors Theses:

• "Immunity, Community, and an Ethics of the Posthuman"
• "Representing Female Trauma in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel"
• "Science, History, and Experience in the Long Eighteenth Century"
• "Post-Human Dystopian Science Fiction"
• "Virgins/Vixens, Maids/Mistresses: The Unreadable Woman Between Fiction and Stage, 1740-1775"
• "'Compliments, Charades and Horrible Blunders': The Labor of Reading in Jane Austen"
• "Virtue Reworded: Contemporary Rewritings of Pamela in the 1740s"

Recently Supervised MA and PhD Topics:

• "The Oceanic Wilderness"
• "The History of the Book in Malaysia and Singapore"
• "The Art of 'Translation' in the Work of Margaret Cavendish"
• "Navigating Mathematics in Nineteenth-Century Science Fiction"
• "Maritime Aeshetics and Its Afterlives"

Graduate Supervision

I am happy to supervise MA and PhD students working on topics that relate to eighteenth-century literature and culture. Topics of special interest include the development of the English novel, early women's writing, travel literature, maritime aeshetics, intellectual history and disciplinarity, early modern cognition, philospohy and literature, European representations of Asia from 1640 to 1810, and the co-development of empiricism and literature across the eighteenth century.

Current Research

Combining literary history, science studies, and the history of ideas, my recent monograph, Minds in Motion: Imagining Empiricism in Eighteenth-Century British Travel Literature (2017; 2020), examines British travel literature in the context of the debates about knowledge and authority that dominated the long eighteenth century. Specifically, I argue that the period's travel literature plays a crucial epistemological function in enabling—even coercing—non-specialists to explore new and often complicated philosophical ideals. I also demonstrate that travel authors offer surprisingly sophisticated critiques of some of the most pressing epistemological questions of the century, often even before these questions are formally expressed in more academic contexts. I hope that Minds in Motion demonstrates to a wide range of scholars the importance of travel literature and its fundamental role in the deeply imbricated histories of science, fiction, and aesthetics.

Another focus of my work has to do with Margaret Cavendish, early women's writing, and the history of philosophy more broadly. In early 2020, I published the first annotated edition of Cavendish's Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668) with Broadview Press. As the final and most succinct articulation of the author's later metaphysics, Grounds is an important contribution to late seventeenth-century debates about materialism and panpsychism, while it also includes intensely speculative sections about regeneration that have interesting parallels with Cavendish's canonic travel fiction, Blazing World. This edition includes a meaty introduction and various appendices, including key passages from comporaries like More and Van Helmont, key passages from Cavendish's Observations, and never-before printed correspondence (including one lively debate between Cavendish and Constantijn Huygens). I am now at work co-editing, with Lara Dodds, a complete collection of Cavendish's work for OUP (Oxford Scholars editions).

I am also at work on two mongraphs: The first, "The Aeshetics of Mental Illness in the 'Age of Reason,'" strives to show that expressions of irrational behavior in the so-called 'age of reason' were never really suppressed but rather filter into and shape the philosphical and literary discourse of the period. This monograph brings together the history of neurology, the history of medicine, and literary studies in order to exmaine how unruly or erratic thinking structures the literary output of the eighteenth century. Rather than being slavishly devoted to empiricst understandings of experience, early century authors tend to investigate the fine line between sanity and madness, reason and irrationality, while also acknowledging that fiction itself is an endeavor that is always potentially insane. The MS has been invited for review at Oxford Univ. Press. The second project, "Cavendish, Romantic: Writing Out of Time," examines Cavendish's important yet largely unstudied place in the history of aeshetics (imagination, beauty, taste), and specifically the ways in which she anticipates much later Romantic thinking that posits imagination as a crucial engine of novelty, pleasure, and knowledge.

My work has appeared in such journals as Eighteenth-Century Life (Duke UP), Studies in the Novel (JHU Press), Configurations (JHU Press), Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Toronto), and The Review of English Studies (Oxford UP), while it also features in broader public venues (including The Washington Post and The Times Literary Supplement). My research has also been supported by The Folger Shakespeare Institute; The Bodleian Library, Oxford; Chawton House Library; Fordham University; National University of Singapore; and the Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE).

Research Interests

• Eighteenth-century literature and culture
• Early women's writing
• Literature and science
• Literature and philosophy
• Travel literature and travel theory
• Fiction and the early English novel
• The history of aesthetics
• The poetics of encounter, especially as they play out in the Asia-Pacific region
• Authors of special interest include Cavendish, Defoe, Swift, and Johnson

Other Information

The International Margaret Cavendish Society

I am the incoming Vice President of The International Margaret Cavendish Society. For more info, see https://www.margaretcavendishsociety.org/.

SASECS

I am the outgoing President of the Southeast Asia Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (SASECS), an official member of ISECS. For more information or to join SASECS, contact me or the new President, Dr. Peh Li Qi (liqi.peh@ntu.edu.sg).

COEDA (Coalition of English Departments in Asia)

I am a co-founder of COEDA, an intiative meant to enhance research collaboration and collegiality between the top-rated English programs in Asia (this network includes NUS, Seoul National Univ., Univ. of Hong Kong, Univ. of Tokyo, and National Taiwan Univ.). Our work ranges across English studies, from linguistics to literature to theatre studies, and focuses especially on our unique mobility in the Asian context. We also host an annual postgraduate conference in rotating venues. For details, see COEDA.

RECENT FELLOWSHIPS and AWARDS

• --Visiting Fellow, Gender Institute & Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University (July 2024)
• --Sassoon Fellow, The Bodleian Library, Oxford University (Michaelmas and Hilary, 2022-23)
• --Visiting Academic, Faculty of Literature, Oxford University (2021-22)
• --NUS / Faculty of Arts Teaching Excellence Award (ATEA), January 2022 (for AY2020-21)
• --FRC/Ministry of Education (MOE) Tier 1 Grant (2018-2021): "Cavendish and Changing Currents in Intellectual History"
• --NUS/FASS Book Completion Grant, October 2016
• --FRC/MOE Tier 1 Grant (2015-18): "Histories of Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century British Literature"
• --NUS/FASS Annual Teaching Excellence Award (ATEA), October 2015 (for AY2014-15)
• --Visiting Research Fellow, King's College London, Sem 1 AY2015-16.
• --NUS/FASS Start-up Grant (2012-15): "Minds in Motion"
• --NUS/FASS Annual Teaching Excellence Award (ATEA), October 2014 (for AY2013-14)
• --Chawton House Library Visiting Fellowship, May 2013.
• --Postdoctoral Fellowship (full year funding), Fordham University, AY2011-12
• --Alumni Dissertation Fellowship (full-year funding), Fordham University, AY2010-11
• --Grant-in-Aid from the Folger Shakespeare Library (full year seminar funding), AY2009-10
• --Research Support Grants, Fordham University, Summer 2010, Fall 2010, and Summer 2011
• --Dissertation Research Fellowship (full-year funding), Fordham University, AY2008-09
• --Presidential Scholarship (full-year funding), Fordham University, AY2004-07