​Su Fang Ng

 

When I left my small town in Malaysia to go to an even smaller town in the United States for college, it was the first time I flew. I was a first generation college goer, and I was doing it in a foreign country. Despite years of watching American television, I was not prepared for the culture shock. The strangeness of the layers of bedsheets was something I recognized from V. S. Naipaul’s description of his own migration.

 

My initial plan to major in Math and Physics gave way to a love of narrative and poetry, of ancient mythology and modern drama. I decided to major in English and minor in classics. In a bit of a rush, I took an intensive summer of Ancient Greek and crammed Latin in another summer of self-study with a professor's tutoring so I could take the subsequent years. It worked out a bit better than skipping first year Calculus and Biology did; no wonder I didn't get the honors I hoped for in Differential Equations and Genetics.

 

I eventually got a PhD in English at the University of Michigan, and my life changed again when I got the chance to teach in Germany for a year. There I quickly learnt not to go grocery-shopping during the lunch break or to jaywalk. As I was finishing the dissertation, I was fortunate to land a tenure-track job ABD at Oklahoma, where I saw my first live rodeo. I now teach at Virginia Tech.

 

My first book, Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge UP, 2007), examines the family-state analogy as a contested political language used by a range of figures, James I and his queen Anne, John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, and Quakers.

 

My second book, Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia: Peripheral Empires in the Global Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines parallel appropriations of Alexander myths in Europe and Southeast Asia in the age of exploration. On related matters is a special issue I edited on Transcultural Networks in the Indian Ocean in Genre (2015). This work has allowed me to travel, on fellowships and to archives.