I love to read, think, write, and talk to other humans (and occasionally trees). I study the movement of knowledge—how ideas migrate, traditions fracture, archives expand, and new forms emerge. 

As a literary scholar, I work at the intersection of philology and history of ideas. My research spans the classical tradition, European and the global Renaissance, the afterlives of antiquity in its many manifestations. I ask: What survives? What is lost? How do poetic forms, architectural spaces and theological symbols transmit knowledge?

I am the author of The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries, A Theory of the Aphorism from Confucius to Twitter, and The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature. My work has been supported by fellowships at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center, Harvard’s Villa I Tatti, the Warburg Institute, and Oxford’s Bodleian Library. In 2023–24, I was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

I hold a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton and a BA from St. John’s College, Annapolis. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford, I joined Yale-NUS in 2012, where I was honored with the NUS Young Researcher’s Award in 2019.

As an Asian-American immigrant back in Asia, a 1.5-generation college graduate, and someone who once struggled with a stutter, I believe in the transformative power of humanistic inquiry. I welcome conversations with all who seek meaning in the journey.

• Comparative Literature and History of Ideas

• The European Classical Traditions (and sometimes Chinese)

• Early Modern Cultures

• Global Renaissance

• Engli Literature, Romance Philology, Geisteswissenschaft