Andrew Hui
Humanities (Literature)
Assistant Professor
Email: andrew.hui@yale-nus.edu.sg
Dr Andrew Hui is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Yale-NUS College. He received his PhD from Princeton University in Department of Comparative Literature and is a graduate of St John’s College, Annapolis.From 2009-2012, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, where he taught in the Introduction to Humanities Program. He has also studied at Yale Divinity School, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Warburg Institute (London), Middlebury Language Schools, and Princeton-in-Beijing.
Dr Hui’s studies have been generously supported by various institutions, such as the Whitney Humanities Centre at Yale (2012 – 2013), the National Endowment of Humanities for a summer of reading Dante in Florence (2014), a Brian Crawford Award at the Warburg Library in London (2015), the Visiting Scholar’s Centre at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (2015), and the Berenson Fellowship at the Villa I Tatti, Florence (2017).
For his doctoral work, he was part of the 2002 inaugural class of graduate scholars of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation.
Dr Hui’s work is concerned with the classical tradition in European Renaissance culture. He is interested in how humanist authors absorbed and adapted the archive of antiquity in their literary works. His methodology is a deeply philological and transnational one—he has published across Latin, Italian, French, and English epic, drama, poetry and poetics. Some of the questions that guide his inquiry are: how are ideas transmitted across vast expanses of geography and chronology? What survives and what is lost in the afterlife of antiquity? How do poetic topoi, visual images, and theological symbols express the history of ideas?
Dr Hui works on the classical tradition of European Renaissance literature. His first book, The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), argues that the period was a ruin-naissance, the birth of the ruin as a category of cultural discourse.
His second book, A Theory of the Aphorism (forthcoming, Princeton University Press, Fall 2018), is a short book on the shortest genre of all: the short saying. It studies the ubiquitous yet under-explored form of the aphorism, one that pervades multiple traditions, from Heraclitus to Confucius, Buddhist sutras to Pascal, Nietzsche to Twitter.
Future works include a monograph on East/West cultural encounters called Confucius the Stoic: The Encounter Between Chinese and Western Philosophy in the Age of Matteo Ricci and one on the phenomenology of shadows called Negative Mimesis: Shadows as Metaphor and Method from Plato to Galileo.
Articles and Book Chapters:
“The Soundscape of the Dying Pagan Gods in Milton’s Nativity Ode” Modern Language Quarterly 78 no. 3 (2017)
“The Many Returns of Philology: A State of the Field Report,”
Journal of the History of Ideas 78 no. 1 (2017)
“Dante’s Book of Shadows: Ombra in the Divine Comedy,” Dante Studies 134 (2016)
“Wordless Texts, Empty Hands: The Metaphysics and Materiality of Texts in Journey to the West” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 75 no. 1 (2015)
“The Birth of Ruins in Quattrocento Adoration Paintings” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 18 no. 2 (2015)
“Horatio’s Philosophy in Hamlet,” Renaissance Drama 41 no. 2 (2013)
“The Textual City: Epic Walks in Virgil, Lucan, and Petrarch,” Oxford Classical Reception Journal 3 no. 2 (2011)
“Voice, Writing, and the Ovidian Play of Signs in Titus Andronicus,” in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in English Poetry, eds. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner and Wolfgang Görtschacher. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2009.
“Texts, Monuments, and the Desire for Immortality,” in Moment to Monument, The Making and Unmaking of Cultural Significance, eds. Ladina Bezzola Lambert and Andrea Ochsner. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2008.
Literature and Humanities I & II
Dante and the European Middle Ages
Shakespeare and the Shape of Life
World Religious Poetry, with Gavin Flood