Joel Kenneth GWEE
 Kenneth is a humanities researcher and educator working at the intersection of grief studies and the English epic across the long eighteenth century. He is chiefly interested in Milton’s reimagining of the epic as a conduit for grief-writing and elegiac transformation. Accordingly, he aims to explore how his poetics of grief linger in the meditative blank verse of the Romantics, themselves entangled in their own idiomatic struggles with bereavement and belatedness.
Kenneth completed his MPhil in English Studies at the University of Cambridge, with a dissertation on Milton’s vitalist materialism and somatic trauma in Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes. He previously obtained his BA (Hons) with a double major in English Literature and Philosophy from the National University of Singapore. |
| Research Interests/ Primary Fields |
John Milton; eighteenth-century meditative blank verse; epic and elegy; grief studies; spectrality and literary influence
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| Dissertation Topic/Title | Sorrowbound: Elegiac Epic and the Spectre of Grief from Milton to His Romantic Afterlives |
| Dissertation Advisor | NUS: Assoc. Prof Walter Lim and Assoc. Prof Anne M. Thell
KCL: Dr Emrys Jones, Senior Lecturer |
| Recent Presentations | ‘This Empyreal Substance Cannot Fail’: Immortal Bodies and the Poetics of Trauma in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Wolfson Research Event, University of Cambridge, 2023. |
| Other Experience and Information | Before embarking on his PhD, Kenneth taught English Language and Literature at various secondary schools with the Ministry of Education. He has also contributed to curriculum planning and development at the pre-university level, with a focus on Knowledge & Inquiry and Literature in English. |