Dr Beryl Pong

My overall research interests are 20th- and 21st-century Anglophone literature, with especial focus on British modernism and late modernism, 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.

I am currently completing my first book, a literary-cultural study titled For the Duration: British Literature and Culture in Wartime. 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.

I am also in the early stages of a second book project, tentatively titled Framing Displacement: Semicolonialism and Women’s Short Fiction. The project explores the way material, effective, and socio-political interrelations between colonizer, colonized, and the postcolonial are addressed by modern and contemporary transnational women writers.

Among other points, it demonstrates why, for formal as well as material and print-cultural reasons, short fiction is a prominent genre for indexing 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’.