I completed my B.A. in English at the University of California at Berkeley and received my M.A. and Ph.D. in British literature from Fordham University (New York, NY). I have lived, studied, and taught in various cities around the world, including Paris, Florence, and Bangkok. After my PhD, I served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Fordham University, and then moved into my present position at National University of Singapore. In 2022-23, I was a Sassoon Fellow at The Bodleian Library, Oxford, and in 2024 will be a Visiting Fellow at the Gender Institute at Australian National University. I am the incoming Vice President of the International Margaret Cavendish Society and the outgoing President of The Southeast Asian Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (SASECS), an official constituent society of The International Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS).
The bulk of my research takes place at the intersection of literary and scientific endeavor. Specifically, I study how philosophical and scientific concepts are articulated in narrative and how durable those concepts are when they are translated into literary form and interrogated by a wide range of people. I am therefore interested not in whether certain scientific or philosophical concepts are tenable but rather how they behave in lived experience and, crucially, in writing. This focus on literature, phenomenology, and scientific modes of knowledge production means that I pay close attention to how eighteenth-century authors develop rhetorical strategies that are adequate to the demands of the earliest and most enthusiastic phases of British empiricism and, in turn, how empirical science borrows the techniques of imaginative writing. It also entails that I think carefully about how literature corresponds to other forms of knowledge making at a time when disciplines themselves are just beginning to differentiate.
For more info, visit my website.
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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.
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).
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RECENT CONFERENCE PAPERS and INVITED TALKS (past few years)
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