Lay Sion Ng visited MESH as Research Fellow in June and July 2024. She holds the position of Assistant Professor of English at the Center for Education of Global Communication (CEGLOC) at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. Her academic focus encompasses environmental humanities, material ecocriticism, Hemingway studies, posthumanism, feminism, teaching English through literature, peer tutoring, and more. She is currently preparing a book titled “Hemingway, Ecology and Culture: Re-reading Hemingway in the Anthropocene” for publication with Bloomsbury Academic (Environmental Cultures Series). Additionally, her article titled “‘Just smell them. Aren’t they lovely?’: Olfaction and Trans-species Imagination in Ernest Hemingway’s Works” is slated for inclusion in “Hemingway and Posthumanism,” edited by Ryan Hediger and Marcos Norris, to be released by the University of Edinburgh Press.
During her doctoral studies at Osaka University Graduate School of Language and Culture, she embarked on academic visits that profoundly shaped her research trajectory. As an academic visitor at the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University in the summer of 2017, she delved into interdisciplinary dialogues surrounding environmental issues. Later that winter, she interned at the Gender Forum Journal at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cologne, where she immersed herself in discussions on gender-related topics. These experiences sparked her fascination with material feminisms, which in turn significantly influenced her doctoral research. Her exploration led her to examine Hemingway’s canonical fiction from a feminist ecocritical perspective, enriching her scholarly endeavors with nuanced insights into the intersection of ecology, gender, and literature.
In addition to Hemingway, she is interested in exploring Chinese-Malaysian fiction through the framework of non-anthropocentrism. Her objective is to illuminate the concept of “rainforest ecology” in these lesser-known Malaysian ecocritical works and introduce them to Western audiences.
Selected Publications:
- Ng, Lay Sion (2022): “Toward a Politics of Cure: Jake Barnes’s Embracing of Otherness in The Sun Also Rises.” The Hemingway Review, Vol. 41, no. 2, spring 2022, 31-48, doi: 10.1353/hem.2022.0003
- Ng, Lay Sion (2021): “The Rotten Matter in A Farewell to Arms: An Ecological Gothic Reading.” F1000 Research, 2021, doi: 10.12688/f1000research.75482.1
- Ng, Lay Sion (2020): “Transhumanism and the Biological Body in Don DeLillo’s Zero K: A Material Feminist Perspective.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Vol. 28, no. 2, summer 2021, 686-708, doi: 10.1093/isle/isaa114