I love to read, think, write, and talk to other humans (and occasionally trees). I study the classical tradition of early modern Europe and the Global Renaissance. I try to live up to Goethe’s maxim that “One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”

I am interested in how humanist authors absorbed and adapted the archive of antiquity. My methodology is a deeply philological and transnational one—I have published across Latin, Italian, French, and English epic, drama, poetry and poetics. I also have training in sinology. I ask: how are ideas transmitted across vast expanses of geography and chronology? What survives and what is lost in the afterlife of antiquity? How do poetic topoi, visual images, and theological symbols express the history of ideas?

My PhD is from Princeton, in Comparative Literature, and my BA from St John’s College, Annapolis. From 2009-2012, I was a postdoc at Stanford University. I joined Yale-NUS in 2012 and was given the NUS Young Researcher’s Award in 2019.

My work has been generously supported by the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale, a Berenson fellowship at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti, a National Endowment of Humanities grant for a summer of reading Dante in Florence, a Brian Crawford Award at the Warburg Library in London and a stint at the Centre for the Study of the Book at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. I am a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin’s Institute for Advanced Studies for 2023-24.

As an Asian-American immigrant back in Asia, a 1.5 generation college graduate who stuttered in high school, I warmly welcome conversations from all who seek meaning in the journey.

• Comparative Literature

• The European Classical Traditions (and sometimes Chinese)

• Early Modern Cultures

• Global Renaissance

• English Literature, Romance Philology, Geisteswissenschaft