Thesis Title: No Other World? Postcolonial Inheritance in the Anglophone World Novel
Supervisor: Professor Ankhi Mukherjee
Research Interests: Postcolonial literature in the global moment, global anglophone writing, worlding in the narrative text, Singapore and Malaysian literature, creative writing as pedagogy.
Doctoral Research: My thesis concerns the novel as a cultural product of the anglicized middle-class in Britain's former colonies. Specifically I am interested in investigating the phenomenon of the globally-read anglophone novel in English, and how it is indebted to colonial constructions of identity, which have since become globalised as part of the anglophone worlding of these narratives. I work primarily on the novel and the authors I currently research on are Kiran Desai, Tan Twan Eng, Hanya Yanagihara and Amanda Lee Koe. They hail from countries where the nation was constructed as part of the colonial and postcolonial episteme of statehood and identity. As a former educator, I am also interested in how this impacts the teaching of literature in English in Singapore as postcolonial curriculum.