Dr Beryl Pong

I am an academic and researcher with interdisciplinary interests in modern and contemporary war; aesthetics; philosophies of space and time; and literary, sound, and visual cultures.

I am a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow hosted by the Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, where I lead the Centre for Drones and Culture.

I also hold affiliated positions with the Faculty of English and with Trinity College at Cambridge, and with the Department of English, Linguistics, and Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore. Previously, I was a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Sheffield. Before that, I was a Research Fellow at Jesus College, University of Cambridge, and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto.

I completed my B.A. Honours at Queen’s University (Canada), M.Sc at the University of Edinburgh, and Ph.D at the University of Cambridge.

Contact: bkmp2 [at] cam.ac.uk / b.k.pong [at] nus.edu.sg

Selected Grants and Recognitions

UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (2023-2027) (£1,076,250) [See project website here]

Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, National University of Singapore (2022)

British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award (2019-2020) (£15,000) [See project website here]

Co-Investigator and Sheffield Lead, “Electronic Soundscapes”, White Rose College of Arts and Humanities (WROCAH) network (2017-2020) (3 PhD Studentships + Stipends, c. £132,993)

Commissioning Section Editor, Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Literature (“Modernist Geographies”), Literature Compass (2015-2021)

Scholar in Residence, Bader International Study Centre, Herstmonceux Castle (2013)

Best Graduate Paper Prize, Moving Modernisms Conference, University of Oxford (2012)

Walter L. Arnstein Prize for Best Graduate Paper Prize, Midwest Conference on British Studies, University of Toronto (2012)

Book

British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration. Oxford Mid-Century Studies Series, Oxford University Press, 2020.

Edited Book

Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology. (Co-edited with Michael Richardson) Technographies Series, Open Humanities Press, forthcoming.

Introductions and Edited Special Issues

“The Art of Drone Warfare.” Journal of War and Culture Studies 15.4 (2022). Contributors: Peter Burt / Drone Wars UK, Alex Adams, Matthew Voice, Sophia Brown, Madonna Kalousian, Sophie Maxwell.

“Wartime.” Modernism/modernity Print Plus 5.2 (2020). Contributors: Randall Stevenson, Adam Piette, Nasser Mufti, Kent Puckett, Jane Hu, Kate McLoughlin, Paul Saint-Amour.

Articles

“Reading Late Modern Wartime in the Anthropocene: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Little Girls.” PMLA 137.2 (March 2022): 262-278.

“Henry Green’s Pigeons.” Modernism/modernity Print Plus 4.3 (2019).

“The Archaeology of Postwar Childhood: Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness.” Journal of Modern Literature 37.3 (Spring 2014): 92-110.

“La France a l’heure Anglaise: Embodied Timescapes and Occupied Landscapes in Storm Jameson’s Cloudless May.” Literature & History 23.1 (Spring 2014): 33-48.

“Space and Time in the Bombed City: Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day.” Literary London Journal 7.1 (March 2009).

Book Chapters

“Orwell, War, and Violence.” Oxford Handbook of George Orwell, edited by Nathan Waddell. Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

“‘The Zoom of a Hornet’: Virginia Woolf, Aural Biopolitics, and the Phenomenology of an Air Raid.” Literary Fiction and the Hearing Sciences, edited by Edward Allen. Routledge, forthcoming.

“War and Peace.” Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Fernald. Oxford University Press, 2021. 440-455.

“The Short Story and the ‘Little Magazine’”. The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English, edited by Adrian Hunter and Paul Delaney. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. 75-92.

Features and Other Writing

“The Aesthetics of Drone Warfare.” British Academy Blog. 14. Sep. 2021

“The Aesthetics of Drone Warfare: A Conversation with Tomas van Houtryve and Mahwish Chishty.” (With Sophie Maxwell). ASAP/J. 8 Sep. 2020.

“How we experience pandemic time.” Oxford University Press Blog. 14 Jul. 2020.

“Excavating Ruin-Time.” Jesus College Annual Report 122 (2016): 41-43.

Reviews

Review of Unmanning: How Humans, Machines, and Media Perform Drone Warfare by Katherine Chandler. Society and Space (13 June 2022).

“Changing Nationhood, Changeless Place: Bill Brandt / Henry Moore at the Hepworth Wakefield Gallery.” Gallery review of Bill Brandt / Henry Moore (Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield). Modernism/modernity 27.3 (September 2020): 609-14.

Review of Liminality and the Short Story, ed. Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergman. Journal of the Short Story in English 69 (Fall 2017): 195-8.

Gallery review of Lee Miller: A Woman’s War (Imperial War Museum, London). Modernism/modernity 23.4 (November 2016): 905-10.

‘Olivia Moaning.’ Review of Olivia Manning: A Woman at War by Deirdre David and Imperial Refugee: Olivia Manning’s Fictions of War by Eve Patten. Women: A Cultural Review 24.4 (December 2013): 371-73.

‘The Globalisation of Time.’ Review of The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature by Adam Barrows. The Cambridge Quarterly 41.3 (September 2012): 389-95.

Teaching

At National University of Singapore (2021-)

  • Modernism, Blitz and After
  • Twenty-First Century British Fiction
  • Topics in Cultural Studies: Drone Aesthetics
  • Honours Theses & Independent Studies Modules

At University of Sheffield (2016-2021)

  • Modern Literature
  • Contemporary Literature
  • Writing Identities: Race, Nation, Empire (MA)
  • Language and Literature in the Workplace (MA)
  • Work Placement with Research Essay (MA)
  • Undergraduate and MA Dissertations