Dr Beryl Pong

My overall research interests are in 20th- and 21st-century Anglophone literature, with especial focus on British modernism and late modernism, theories and philosophies of time, and war. My work is informed by cultural studies and cultural history, and I have an abiding interest in narrative and genre studies, and in the interdisciplinary intersections between literature and other media.

My book, British Literature and Culture in Wartime: For the Duration, was published by Oxford University Press’s Mid-Century Studies Series (2020). It argues that spatial and temporal dislocation were defining characteristics of the World War II urban bombing campaigns, and it shows how figures in literature, film, photography, and painting harnessed or exploited their media’s distinctive temporal properties in response. Showing why the war was often fashioned as a memory, even while it was taking place, I discuss how the uses of modernism became as important as modernism itself, and how wartime forms of temporal re-imagining—whether through time capsules, time zone changes, or images of ruin and repair—have particular salience for understanding philosophies and phenomenologies of time during the mid-century. The book places the Second World War and a fear of time, called chronophobia, within a longer history of how modern wartime was perceived—from seemingly defined and bounded to proliferated and everyday.

I am currently at work on two new projects. The first is a literary history of the modern short story through the concept of semicolonialism, multiply understood as a material, affective, and socio-political condition characterizing sovereign states who are dependent upon imperial power. It focuses on transnational women writers to index the gendered histories of labour migration, emigration, and travel, and why we need to go beyond ideas of regional or national exceptionalism in short fiction literary history to understand it as a ‘world genre’. My second project is an interdisciplinary examination of the relationship between drones and aesthetics. It looks at the ways drones and their current relationships to AI, sensors, and simulation produce new ways of interpreting and experiencing the world; at how imaginaries and aesthetics facilitate the widespread and increasing use of intrusive technologies; and at the aesthetic arts, including works of literature, film, visual art, and game design, which are staging interventions around them.