Faculty Profile

Emily Soon joined SMU in 2020. Her research focuses on cross-cultural literary exchange between Asia and Europe in the premodern and modern eras. She received her PhD in English from King’s College London in 2019, having completed her MPhil in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at the University of Cambridge and her BA (First Class Honours) in English and Related Literature at the University of York. Prior to joining SMU, she served as a Research Fellow at the National Museum of Singapore, where she studied Shakespeare’s place in Singapore’s cultural and educational history. Before that, she worked as a Curriculum Planning Officer in the Ministry of Education’s English Language and Literature Branch and taught Language Arts and Literature in an integrated programme school. Her research has been published in Modern Philology, Shakespeare Survey and England’s Asian Renaissance.

Qualifications

• PhD, King’s College London, 2019
• MPhil, University of Cambridge, 2012
• BA, University of York, 2006

Research Interests

• Literary and Cultural History of Singapore
• Early Modern Literature
• World Literature

Course(s) Taught in SMU

• Big Questions
• Asia and World Literature: Beyond Orientalism
• Imagining the Self: Literature, Ethnicity and Gender in Asia