Claudine Ang

Associate Professor Claudine Ang completed her doctoral studies in the Department of History at Cornell University. Her dissertation, Statecraft on the Margins: Drama, Poetry, and the Civilizing Mission in Eighteenth-Century Vietnam, was awarded the 2012 Lauriston Sharp Dissertation Prize. Before joining the History Department, she was Associate Professor of Humanities at Yale-NUS College. Her first book, Poetic Transformations: Eighteenth-Century Cultural Projects on the Mekong Plains, was published by the Harvard University Asia Center in 2019.

Ang’s research draws together literature and history, as well as the fields of East Asia and Southeast Asia. With a focus on 18th- and 19th-century Vietnamese frontier history, her research explores the ways in which literary production shapes the world. Ang has a special interest in translation and has translated a vernacular Vietnamese play, written in the demotic Vietnamese script, and landscape poems composed in classical Chinese. Her latest book project is called On Listening and Dissonance. In it, she seeks to understand how kings listen to their subjects, how the vernacular spins tales about the classical, how the living communicate with the dead, and how dreamers eavesdrop on themselves in their slumber.

Ang’s teaching includes courses on Vietnamese history and literature, Southeast Asian history, and modern Chinese history.