Speakers

Grace V.S. Chin

Grace V. S. Chin is Senior Lecturer in English Language Studies at Universiti Sains Malaysia. Using comparative and multidisciplinary approaches, she specialises in postcolonial Southeast Asian literatures in English, with focus on the intersections of race, gender, and/or class in contemporary societies and diasporas. Her publications include essays on the Anglophone literatures of Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei Darussalam, and the Philippines in refereed international journals as well as edited volumes. She has also published edited and co-edited volumes, the latest of which is The Postcolonial Millennium: New Directions in Malaysian Literature in English (Routledge, 2024). She can be contacted at [email protected].

Elmo Gonzaga

Elmo Gonzaga is Associate Professor in the Division of Cultural Studies and Director of the MA in Intercultural Studies Programme at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He obtained his PhD from the Rhetoric Department at University of California, Berkeley. His second monograph, Monsoon Marketplace: Capitalism, Media, and Modernity in Manila and Singapore, was published by Fordham University Press last year. His work has appeared in Cinema Journal, Cultural Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, South East Asia Research, and the Journal of Asian Studies. With Brian Bernards, he co-edited the forthcoming volume, Inter-Asian Media Frictions: Creative Labor, Co-Production, and Outsourcing, which is under contract with Amsterdam University Press.

Philip Holden

Philip Holden worked for 25 years at Nanyang Technological University and the National University of Singapore. His scholarship in auto/biography studies includes the book Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity and the Nation-State, and articles in major journals such as biography, Life Writing, a/b: Auto/biography Studies, and Postcolonial Studies. He has published widely on Singapore and Southeast Asian literatures, is the co-author of The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English, and one of the editors of Writing Singapore, the most comprehensive historical anthology of Singapore literature in English. He is now an independent scholar, exploring Singapore history in a variety of genres, with a particular curiosity about discourses of mental health and illness.

Zhou Hau Liew

Zhou Hau Liew is Assistant Professor in the International PhD Program of Taiwan and Transcultural Studies at National Chung Hsing University. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. His current book project theorizes Sinophone cultural productions that remap the Cold War in Asia from an ecological perspective. His essays have appeared in English Language Notes, Critical Asian Studies, Asia in the Old and New Cold Wars, and PR&TA.

Chi P. Pham is a Tenured Researcher at the Institute of Literature, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, Hanoi. She received her first Ph.D. degree in Literary Theory in Vietnam and her second Ph.D. degree in Comparative Literature in University of California, Riverside (USA). She is the secretary of the Association for the Study of Literature and Ecology in ASEAN (ASLE-ASEAN). Her publications include, Aesthetic Experience in Ramayana Epic (Hanoi National University Press, 2015); Literature and Nation-building in Vietnam: The Invisibilization of the Indians (Routledge, 2021). She is also the co-editor of Reading South Vietnam's Writers: The Reception of Western Thought in Journalism and Literature (Springer Nature, 2023). She has edited four collections of Indian and South East Asian folktales in Vietnamese translation, and has co-edited a collection of Vietnamese environmental short stories in English translation entitled Revenge of Gaia: Contemporary Vietnamese Ecofiction with Chitra Sankaran (Penguin Random House, 2021). She has also co-edited Ecologies in Southeast Asian Literatures: Histories, Myths and Societies with Chitra Sankaran and Gurpreet Kaur (Vernon Press, 2019) and The Vietnamese Literature: Readings from the Inside (special issue in SUVANNABHUMI Multi-disciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 14.1, 2022) with Uma Jayaraman. Her latest publications in the field of Environmental Humanities include “Political Orientation in Ecocriticism: National Allegory in Vietnamese Ecofiction by Trần Duy Phiên." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 24.5 (2022) and Environment and Narrative in Vietnam (co-edited with Ursula K. Heise, co-author of one chapter, and single author of another chapter) published by Palgrave Macmillan. 

Dominic Sy is Assistant Professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines Diliman, where he teaches courses on Southeast Asian literature and critical theory. His scholarly work has focused on the discursive convergences and divergences among pre-war political movements in the Philippines—in particular among the Sakdalistas and the Communists. His collection of short stories, A Natural History of Empire, won the Kritika Kultura / Ateneo de Manila University Press First Book Prize and was a finalist for the Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award.