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Su Fang Ng

Su Fang Ng, Professor

Su Fang Ng, Professor
Su Fang Ng, Professor

Department of English
435 Shanks Hall 
181 Turner Street, NW 
Blacksburg, VA 24061
ngsf@vt.edu

Su Fang Ng is a professor of English and Clifford A. Cutchins III Professor at Virginia Tech. She is the author of two monographs: Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge UP 2007) and Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia: Peripheral Empires in the Global Renaissance (Oxford UP 2019). Her book on Alexander the Great won the Renaissance Society of America’s 2020 Phyllis Goodhart. Gordan Prize for best book in Renaissance Studies. She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, the National Humanities Center, the University of Texas at Austin, Heidelberg University, All Souls College, Oxford, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Her research areas include early modern literature (especially Shakespeare and Milton), colonial and postcolonial literatures, and comparative literature.

  • Early Modern Literature
  • Shakespeare
  • Milton
  • Postcolonial Literature
  • Comparative Literature
  • Ph.D., English Language & Literature, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 2001.
    Distinguished Dissertation Award, Rackham Graduate School.
  • Ph.D., English Language & Literature, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 1996.
    Distinguished Dissertation Award, Rackham Graduate School.
  • B.A., English, cum laude, Classics minor, Whitman College, WA, 1993.
  • Member, MLA Prize for a First Book Selection Committee, 2020-2021.
  • Member, Forum Executive Committee, LLC 17th-Century English, MLA, 13 Jan 2020-Jan 2025.
  • Member, Delegate Assembly, Regional Delegate for the Mid-Atlantic, MLA, 13 Jan 2020-Jan 2023.
  • Nominating Committee, Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender, 2020-2022.
  • Member, Executive Committee, Milton Society of America, 2019-2021.
  • Member, Advisory Board, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Spring 2018-
  • 2020 Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize, Renaissance Society of America, for best book in Renaissance Studies awarded to Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia.
  • 2007 Clifford A. Cutchins III Professor, Virginia Tech

Books

  • Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia: Peripheral Empires in the Global Renaissance. Classical Presences. Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 432.
    Awarded 2020 Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize, Renaissance Society of America, for best book in Renaissance Studies.
  • Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-Century England. Cambridge University Press, 2007; paperback reprint, 2009. Pp. viii + 236.

Journal Special Issue

  • Editor, Transcultural Networks in the Indian Ocean, 16th-18th Centuries: Europeans and Indian Ocean Societies in Interaction, special issue of Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 48.2 (July 2015): 119-340 (221 pages; Ng, “Introduction,” 119-129).

Select Journal Articles

  • “The Transnational Mirror for Princes and Shakespearean Tragedy,” special issue on “English among Literatures of Early Modernity,” ed. András Kiséry, Shakespeare Studies 48 (October 2020), 34-40.
  • “Milton, Buchanan, and King Arthur.” Review of English Studies 70, no. 296 (September 2019): 659-680.
  • “Indian Interpreters in the Making of Colonial Historiography: New Light on Mark Wilks’s Historical Sketches of the South of India.” English Historical Review 134, no. 569 (August 2019): 821-854.
  • “Dutch Wars, Global Trade, and the Heroic Poem: Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis (1666) and Amin’s Sya’ir Perang Mengkasar (1670).” Modern Philology 109.3 (February 2012): 352-84.
  • “Pirating Paradise: Alexander the Great, Dutch East Indies, and Satanic Empire in Milton’s Paradise Lost.” Milton Studies 52 (2011): 59-91.

Select Book Chapters

  • “Reading Ancient Fables from the East: Pierre-Daniel Huet’s Two-Origin Etiology of Romance.” In Beyond Greece and Rome: The Ancient Near East in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jane Grogan. Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 93-112.
  • “Resistance.” In A Cultural History of Western Empires, Vol. 3 The Renaissance, ed. Ania Loomba, gen. ed. Antoinette Burton, Bloomsbury Cultural History series. London: Bloomsbury Academic, UK, 2018. Pp. 181-202.
  • “Genealogical Memory: Constructing Female Rule in Seventeenth-Century Aceh.” In Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, ed. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. Pp. 135-57.
  • “Bare-forked Animals: King Lear and the Problems of Patriarchalism.” In Family Politics in Early Modern Literature, ed. Hannah Crawforth and Sarah Lewis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. 173-90.
  • “Spenser’s Erotic Refusals.” In The Erotics of Memory in Shakespeare’s England, ed. John Garrison and Kyle Pivetti. New York: Routledge, 2016. Pp. 192-206.
  • “The Alexander Romance in Southeast Asia: Wonder, Islam, and Knowledge of the World.” In Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages: Transcultural Perspectives, ed. Markus Stock and Stefanie Schmitt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Pp. 104-22.
  • German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Learn German in Germany award, July, 2018.
  • Solmsen Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2017-2018.
  • Visiting Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford University, UK, April-June 2016.
  • Visiting Fellow, Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University, Germany, October 2015 – March 2016.
  • Affiliated Fellow, International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, Netherlands, June 2011.
  • Faculty Fellow, Harrington Fellows Program, University of Texas, Austin, TX, 2009-10.
  • Fellow, National Humanities Center, Research Triangle, NC, 2007-2008.
  • Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 2005-2006.
  • “Race in the East Indies Contact Zone.” ACMRS/Folger Institute conference on “Race and Periodization.” Folger Shakespeare Library, September 5-7, 2019.
  • “The Transnational Mirror for Princes.” Conference on “‘Mercury guide my tongue’: Early Modern English Literature as a Transnational Phenomenon,” City University New York Graduate Center, April 5, 2019.
  • “Alexander and Fictions of Worldmaking from Britain to Southeast Asia.” Keynote Lecture, Early Modern Conference, “Worldmaking, 1500-1800,” University of California at Santa Barbara, February 22-23, 2019.
  • “In the Orbit of the Ottomans: English and Malay Literatures of Contact.” Medieval and Early Modern Studies, University of Pennsylvania, September 12, 2018.
  • Renaissance/Early Modern
  • Shakespeare
  • Milton
  • Travel Literature
  • Postcolonial Literature
  • World Literature: Encounters with Asia.
  • German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Learn German in Germany award, July 2018.
  • Visiting Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford University, UK, April-June 2016.
  • Visiting Fellow, Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University, Germany, October 2015 – March 2016.
  • Affiliated Fellow, International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, Netherlands, June 2011.
  • Scholarship, Dutch course, Taalunie (Language Union), Zeist, Netherlands, July 19-Aug 7, 2010.
  • American Philosophical Society/British Academy Joint Fellowship for Research in London, June-August, 2007.

Select Media Mentions