Khairillah Irwan
I’m currently a first year student on the Masters by Research track. I graduated from Yale-NUS College in 2023 with a BA (Highest Honours) in Literature. My senior capstone, focusing on the intersection between conceptions of world literature, Arabic literature, and horror fiction, was awarded the Outstanding Capstone in Literature Prize.
In my graduate research, I intend to think through contemporary questions of vulnerability, imagination, and ghostliness, conditioned by forms of political and literary thinking that permeate the Arabic and Malay literary traditions. These extend into pressing and unresolved historical questions of worlding and community, as they become encoded and apprehended through literary forms.
| Research Interests/ Primary Fields |
By way of area and time period, I am broadly interested in Arabic literature and Malay world literature that emerge amidst the cultural and political shocks of the 20th and 21st centuries.
I am interested in how the study of these deep-rooted literary trajectories activate the concerns of fields including world literature, comparative literature, literary modernity and postcolonial studies. My engagement with these concerns is focalised through the intensive study of speculative and horror fiction, as they emerge in their various guises across Arab and Malay world literary and cultural spheres. |
| Dissertation Topic/ Title | Haunting Comparisons: Ghostly Genealogies and Affects across the Malay and Arab Worlds |
| Dissertation Advisor | Senior Lecturer Tania ROY |
| Recent Presentations | ‘At the Borders of Reality: Trauma and Rearticulation in Singaporean Malay Literature’, ACLA Conference, 2023 |