Hello!  I’m a literary scholar and a cultural historian. I trace the smallest turns of language to uncover the largest ideas—close reading classical and not-so-classical texts for their hidden philosophical provocations.

I'm the author of three books: 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. 

Two at work are: The Marvelous Universe of Journey to the West (Princeton) and The Emperor's Maze: The Jesuits in China and the Making of a Global Age (Penguin).

My work has been translated into seven languages and reviewed in the New Yorker and Wall Street Journal. I've appeared on BBC radio and Swiss TV's philosophy program Sternstunde. I've been lucky to have received fellowships from the Warburg Institute in London, Villa I Tatti in Florence and the Wiko in Berlin. My PhD is in comparative literature from Princeton.

Loves: microcosms, architecture of libraries, typography

Activities: reading, running, listening to Mahler symphonies, offering refreshments to friends and strangers.

From 2012 to 2025, I taught at Yale-NUS College. Now I am at National University of  Singapore. I was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin for the 2023-24 academic year.

I am represented by Catherine Clarke of Felicity Bryan Associates (UK) and Zoë Pagnamenta of Calligraph (US).