Yale-NUS College

Chrystal Ho Jia Min

Class of 2019

Capstone project: The Rewriting of Penelope’s Story in Louise Gluck’s Meadowlands and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad

Chrystal has always been fascinated by the act of storytelling, and considers literature to be the lens she uses to view the world. She is keenly interested in the retelling of old stories and feminist literature, and will be writing her capstone on modern reinterpretations of Penelope’s story from the Odyssey. As a writer, she is inspired by the craft and historiography of Virginia Woolf, and enjoys working with the poetic form. She also works as a peer tutor in the Yale-NUS Writers’ Centre.
Macca Lee Xinlei

Class of 2019

Capstone project: The Language of Trauma in Incendies: Wajdi Mouawad’s search for a postcolonial expression of exile within and beyond the colonial language

Having recently returned from a year and a half abroad in France studying French Literature at Université Paris-Sorbonne and École Normale Supérieure while pursuing a career in fashion photography on the side, Macca is currently a senior who decided to integrate his personal convictions such as ideas of social justice and activism into both his academics and artwork to.

Between running Brewhouse, Yale-NUS’s student-run café, and spending an inordinate of time socialising, Macca finds time for the small pleasures in life like journalling in public spaces and staring at the rain from the comfort of his sheet. Whenever possible, he always finds himself engaging in lengthy discussions regarding and learning about identity and representation across different cultures.
Qi En Teoh (minor)

Class of 2019

Literature is great because it brings me places I can never go in real life, shows me things I would otherwise never see, and teaches me about how humans live and deal with the rollercoaster ride that is life. The best part about reading a poem or novel is when there’s a line that sticks in my head that I just can’t forget. Literature helps me make sense of this, and I like that it gives me the tools to appreciate the fine things in between the lines that I wouldn’t pick up on a casual reading. I think it’s valuable for myself too to be able to express in writing things that are difficult to pin down.

I’m interested in 19th cen. British fiction and Japanese literature. The last best thing I read was The Remains of the Day by Ishiguro and one of my all-time favourites is Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto.
Michelle Lee

Class of 2019

Capstone project: ‘Sometimes Silent Protest is Not Enough’: Using Virginia Woolf’s theories of silence to understand Josef Ng’s Brother Cane

Michelle Lee is a Literature major and Arts and Humanities minor whose interests ironically centre around the absence of words and writing. As an Arts and Humanities minor with a focus on art history, she is interested in the intersection of art and literature, and particularly in performance art as a mode of communication using the body. She aspires to be a curator in a modern art museum and has previously interned at the NUS Museum and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. In her spare time she takes care of her three plants, Noodles, Sinwar, and Gregina.
Chow Huiru

Class of 2020
Shawn Hoo

Class of 2020

Shawn is a Literature major and Philosophy minor who believes that cultural texts can shape and store the worlds in which they circulate. He is broadly interested in exploring literary and cinematic production from East Asia and Southeast Asia (in particular Singapore) from the early twentieth century to the present. Through these texts, he wants to think through regional interconnections and resonances on topics such as modernity, multilingualism, aesthetics, politics and queerness. The Literature major gives him the flexibility and theoretical frameworks to work in a variety of mediums including writing, film, performance and ‘new’ media. He enjoys creative writing, and attempts to write poetry, creative nonfiction, short stories—when academic writing isn’t constantly asking to be written.

He is currently working on a capstone project that investigates a single trajectory of the HIV/AIDS ‘archive’ in Singapore theatre (1989–2015). The project will attempt to track theatre’s development alongside queer history, the social history of HIV/AIDS and media history.
Carson Huang

Class of 2020

“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible form of magic” – Albus Dumbledore. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling.

Saluete! Carson is a wannabe Classics scholar disguised as a Literature Major. His love for reading has since grown into a fascination for excavating socio-historical contexts from mere words! In class he enjoys being the most knowledgeable person on Graeco-Roman myths (only because he hasn’t taken a class on Roman or Greek literature in Yale-NUS… yet) and will stun you with his knowledge of the Graeco-Roman Pantheon. One of his most memorable moments in class so far was having his Professors ask to talk about Greek Myths in class. He is currently attempting to learn two ancient languages simultaneously (no prizes for guessing which ones) in what he hopes is a contribution to his capstone. Besides his dive into classical antiquity, Carson enjoys swimming, singing (choral and musical), and spilling tea.

His current capstone plan is to compare myths from other traditions to the Greek or Roman one. Share some myths with him if you see him around!
Kan Ren Jie

Class of 2020
Heeeun (Monica) Kim

Class of 2020
Madison Lommen

Class of 2020

Madi Lommen walked out of the first LH1 class at Yale-NUS and defiantly declared she would “struggle with literature”. Alas, Ursula Le Guin was all too right when she said that no serious writer is not also a serious reader. A desire to write well, then, led Madi to love reading and thus to the Literature major. Her literary favorites include novels of diaspora that span generations—Pachinko, Homegoing, Shame—and those that write outside the box—Mister God, This is Anna or Zorba, the Greek. She recently spent a semester abroad in Jordan studying humanitarian innovation among refugees and plans to turn her findings into a capstone exploring narratives of forced displacement. When Madi is not in the library or at the Writers’ Center, you can find her playing touch rugby or enjoying the outdoors.
Lu Yi

Class of 2020

Lu Yi resides in the cross-section between Literature, fine arts, and… MCS? She chose literature simply because she loves literature seminars. The different perspectives around a table, the diversity of approaches in analysis, everything from philological to historical-contextual, provides a plethora of methods that yields fascinating results when applied to different texts via different individuals. There’s always more that can be found, which is kind of like treasure hunting for adults except that everyone can share their nuggets of wisdom and everyone goes home richer than they began.

For her capstone, she wants to blend her three main interests together… somehow… it’s a work in progress, okay?
Yogesh Tulsi

Class of 2020

Yogesh Tulsi is a third year Literature student particularly fascinated by the challenges posed by non-Western literatures and new media to canonical ideas of narratives and storytelling. What are the kind of questions and answers that emerge when one applies a serious critical lens to texts traditionally overlooked or dismissed by the canon? How can we broaden the scope of literary studies and venture into more experimental ground? In his free time, Yogesh enjoys bad movies and consuming various kinds of video essays.
Wong Shiying

Class of 2020

Hi there, I am a third year student who is fascinated with the ancient world. Most of the Literature classes I’ve taken in Yale-NUS dabble in Graeco-Roman classics, and I have grown to adore Ovid’s wicked sense of humour as well as the beautiful eroticism of Sappho’s poetry. I am fluent in Classical Chinese (and hopefully Latin by next year) and am excited to delve more deeply into the works of these two great civilisations.

Why these old texts? As I become more familiar with the classics, I begin to understand where a lot of other books fit in. Identifying these references in my reading has allowed me to unpack depths I didn’t even know were there before. It’s somewhat like developing an appreciation for wine – hidden floral, fruity and oaky elements begin to emerge and I am better able to articulate my tastes!
Capucine Barcellona (minor)

Class of 2020
Julia Chin (minor)

Class of 2020
Audrey Lim (minor)

Class of 2020

Audrey is a Third Year Anthropology Major and Literature Minor. She appreciates both fields of study for the way they have drawn her into the fundamental search for the meaning of Life. Novels, short stories, plays and poems too, all capture what an author had found interesting in his/her lifetime and in this sense, Literature can be seen as a gateway into the human mind and into humanity’s diversity. The idea that someone would pour hours, sometimes devoting their whole life, into thinking and writing about something is also inspiring to her. More and more she realises how important books have been in her life, moulding her thought-life and character, and just as she sometimes finds herself saying, “hey, this text understands me!”, she would like to say in return: I understand it too.

Both Anthropology and Literature are ways to examine the diversity of human experience, and this is how she has chosen to take on the deeply personal question of what it means to be human in her time at Yale-NUS. She continues to search, to ponder, to grow in her love for learning.
Jan-Michal Ong (minor)

Class of 2020

As Leo Tolstoy writes in What is Art, a truly great work is the conduit through which the artist communicates important feelings to his reader, who is subsequently infected with those sensibilities. Indeed, I am drawn to literature not only because it allows me to meditate on the essential questions of life – love, death, one’s reason for existence – but also for providing me with the opportunity to peer into the innermost depths of another’s soul. I daresay that I have resonated more deeply with certain fictional characters than I have even with my closest intimates.

I am chiefly interested in the intersections between history, literature and philosophy and believe that they work in tandem with each other in the effort to comprehend the human condition. My interests lie in the nineteenth-century European novel (and more broadly speaking, European thought), and I enjoy very much the works of writers such as Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Goethe, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.
See Wern Hao (minor)

Class of 2020
Kevin Wong (minor)

Class of 2020

Kevin is a fourth year student in the Double Degree Programme with Law, as well as a prospective Literature Major. Having grown up immersed in fantasy books, film, video games, and television. the Literature Major affords him a welcome opportunity to study language and the stories that people tell with it. He particularly enjoys grand tales of gods and heroes; of the rise and fall of empires; of the individual situated against the overwhelming forces of time, culture, and history.

Hoping to bring together both Law and Literature in his capstone project next year, Kevin has tentative plans to explore Ovidian epic and poetry for its legalistic valences in its coverage of mythological ‘property disputes’, with implications for classical rhetoric, the pseudo-legal status of the Roman gods, the concept of ownership, and fundamental ideas about natural justice.

Kevin has plans to pursue graduate school in the legal humanities, with an research interest on the intersection between legal, literary, and classical studies.

Outside of classes, he spends his time gaming, reading, and watching television – all preferably with a cup of bubble tea in hand.
Faris Joraimi

Class of 2021
Adeline Loh

Class of 2021

Adeline came to the realisation that she wouldn’t mind doing literature for the rest of her life in junior college and has never looked back since. She is drawn by the way literature connects people from vastly different backgrounds and how it continuously shapes the way she views the world. Her interests lie in interrogating the intersections of the postcolonial, feminism, and ethics in literary works and what they teach us about being human. As an Arts and Humanities minor with a focus on creative writing, she spent a summer writing poetry in Greece on the college’s Writing Fellowship and hopes to branch out into creative nonfiction next. Beyond her literary pursuits, she spends her spare time on her hobbies which include making tea, cooking noodles, and doing laundry.
Nigel Loh

Class of 2021
Kukhanya Magubane

Class of 2021
Kelly Ng

Class of 2021
Sidharth Praveen

Class of 2021
Lisa Tan

Class of 2021
Yap Jia Yi

Class of 2021
Isabel Chua (minor)

Class of 2021
Esther Foo (minor)

Class of 2021
Ignatius Koh (minor)

Class of 2021
Brandon Lim (minor)

Class of 2021
Chloe Lim (minor)

Class of 2021
Mathias Ooi (minor)

Class of 2021
Tan Qian Hui (minor)

Class of 2021
Teo Wen Min (minor)

Class of 2021
Peh Yi Lin (minor)

Class of 2021
Nicholas Quek (minor)

Class of 2021
Adair Simpson (minor)

Class of 2021
Prairie Soh (minor)

Class of 2021
Jason Yeung (minor)

Class of 2021

Chrystal Ho Jia Min
About
Capstone project: The Rewriting of Penelope’s Story in Louise Gluck’s Meadowlands and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad

Chrystal has always been fascinated by the act of storytelling, and considers literature to be the lens she uses to view the world. She is keenly interested in the retelling of old stories and feminist literature, and will be writing her capstone on modern reinterpretations of Penelope’s story from the Odyssey. As a writer, she is inspired by the craft and historiography of Virginia Woolf, and enjoys working with the poetic form. She also works as a peer tutor in the Yale-NUS Writers’ Centre.
Macca Lee Xinlei
About
Capstone project: The Language of Trauma in Incendies: Wajdi Mouawad’s search for a postcolonial expression of exile within and beyond the colonial language

Having recently returned from a year and a half abroad in France studying French Literature at Université Paris-Sorbonne and École Normale Supérieure while pursuing a career in fashion photography on the side, Macca is currently a senior who decided to integrate his personal convictions such as ideas of social justice and activism into both his academics and artwork to.

Between running Brewhouse, Yale-NUS’s student-run café, and spending an inordinate of time socialising, Macca finds time for the small pleasures in life like journalling in public spaces and staring at the rain from the comfort of his sheet. Whenever possible, he always finds himself engaging in lengthy discussions regarding and learning about identity and representation across different cultures.
Qi En Teoh (minor)
About
Literature is great because it brings me places I can never go in real life, shows me things I would otherwise never see, and teaches me about how humans live and deal with the rollercoaster ride that is life. The best part about reading a poem or novel is when there’s a line that sticks in my head that I just can’t forget. Literature helps me make sense of this, and I like that it gives me the tools to appreciate the fine things in between the lines that I wouldn’t pick up on a casual reading. I think it’s valuable for myself too to be able to express in writing things that are difficult to pin down.

I’m interested in 19th cen. British fiction and Japanese literature. The last best thing I read was The Remains of the Day by Ishiguro and one of my all-time favourites is Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto.
Michelle Lee
About

Capstone project: ‘Sometimes Silent Protest is Not Enough’: Using Virginia Woolf’s theories of silence to understand Josef Ng’s Brother Cane

Michelle Lee is a Literature major and Arts and Humanities minor whose interests ironically centre around the absence of words and writing. As an Arts and Humanities minor with a focus on art history, she is interested in the intersection of art and literature, and particularly in performance art as a mode of communication using the body. She aspires to be a curator in a modern art museum and has previously interned at the NUS Museum and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. In her spare time she takes care of her three plants, Noodles, Sinwar, and Gregina.
Chow Huiru
Shawn Hoo
About
Shawn is a Literature major and Philosophy minor who believes that cultural texts can shape and store the worlds in which they circulate. He is broadly interested in exploring literary and cinematic production from East Asia and Southeast Asia (in particular Singapore) from the early twentieth century to the present. Through these texts, he wants to think through regional interconnections and resonances on topics such as modernity, multilingualism, aesthetics, politics and queerness. The Literature major gives him the flexibility and theoretical frameworks to work in a variety of mediums including writing, film, performance and ‘new’ media. He enjoys creative writing, and attempts to write poetry, creative nonfiction, short stories—when academic writing isn’t constantly asking to be written.

He is currently working on a capstone project that investigates a single trajectory of the HIV/AIDS ‘archive’ in Singapore theatre (1989–2015). The project will attempt to track theatre’s development alongside queer history, the social history of HIV/AIDS and media history.
Carson Huang
About
“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible form of magic” – Albus Dumbledore. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling.

Saluete! Carson is a wannabe Classics scholar disguised as a Literature Major. His love for reading has since grown into a fascination for excavating socio-historical contexts from mere words! In class he enjoys being the most knowledgeable person on Graeco-Roman myths (only because he hasn’t taken a class on Roman or Greek literature in Yale-NUS… yet) and will stun you with his knowledge of the Graeco-Roman Pantheon. One of his most memorable moments in class so far was having his Professors ask to talk about Greek Myths in class. He is currently attempting to learn two ancient languages simultaneously (no prizes for guessing which ones) in what he hopes is a contribution to his capstone. Besides his dive into classical antiquity, Carson enjoys swimming, singing (choral and musical), and spilling tea.

His current capstone plan is to compare myths from other traditions to the Greek or Roman one. Share some myths with him if you see him around!
Kan Ren Jie
Heeeun (Monica) Kim
Madison Lommen
About
Madi Lommen walked out of the first LH1 class at Yale-NUS and defiantly declared she would “struggle with literature”. Alas, Ursula Le Guin was all too right when she said that no serious writer is not also a serious reader. A desire to write well, then, led Madi to love reading and thus to the Literature major. Her literary favorites include novels of diaspora that span generations—Pachinko, Homegoing, Shame—and those that write outside the box—Mister God, This is Anna or Zorba, the Greek. She recently spent a semester abroad in Jordan studying humanitarian innovation among refugees and plans to turn her findings into a capstone exploring narratives of forced displacement. When Madi is not in the library or at the Writers’ Center, you can find her playing touch rugby or enjoying the outdoors.
Lu Yi
About
Lu Yi resides in the cross-section between Literature, fine arts, and… MCS? She chose literature simply because she loves literature seminars. The different perspectives around a table, the diversity of approaches in analysis, everything from philological to historical-contextual, provides a plethora of methods that yields fascinating results when applied to different texts via different individuals. There’s always more that can be found, which is kind of like treasure hunting for adults except that everyone can share their nuggets of wisdom and everyone goes home richer than they began.

For her capstone, she wants to blend her three main interests together… somehow… it’s a work in progress, okay?
Yogesh Tulsi
About
Yogesh Tulsi is a third year Literature student particularly fascinated by the challenges posed by non-Western literatures and new media to canonical ideas of narratives and storytelling. What are the kind of questions and answers that emerge when one applies a serious critical lens to texts traditionally overlooked or dismissed by the canon? How can we broaden the scope of literary studies and venture into more experimental ground? In his free time, Yogesh enjoys bad movies and consuming various kinds of video essays.
Wong Shiying
About
Hi there, I am a third year student who is fascinated with the ancient world. Most of the Literature classes I’ve taken in Yale-NUS dabble in Graeco-Roman classics, and I have grown to adore Ovid’s wicked sense of humour as well as the beautiful eroticism of Sappho’s poetry. I am fluent in Classical Chinese (and hopefully Latin by next year) and am excited to delve more deeply into the works of these two great civilisations.

Why these old texts? As I become more familiar with the classics, I begin to understand where a lot of other books fit in. Identifying these references in my reading has allowed me to unpack depths I didn’t even know were there before. It’s somewhat like developing an appreciation for wine – hidden floral, fruity and oaky elements begin to emerge and I am better able to articulate my tastes!
Capucine Barcellona (minor)
Julia Chin (minor)
Audrey Lim (minor)
About
Audrey is a Third Year Anthropology Major and Literature Minor. She appreciates both fields of study for the way they have drawn her into the fundamental search for the meaning of Life. Novels, short stories, plays and poems too, all capture what an author had found interesting in his/her lifetime and in this sense, Literature can be seen as a gateway into the human mind and into humanity’s diversity. The idea that someone would pour hours, sometimes devoting their whole life, into thinking and writing about something is also inspiring to her. More and more she realises how important books have been in her life, moulding her thought-life and character, and just as she sometimes finds herself saying, “hey, this text understands me!”, she would like to say in return: I understand it too.

Both Anthropology and Literature are ways to examine the diversity of human experience, and this is how she has chosen to take on the deeply personal question of what it means to be human in her time at Yale-NUS. She continues to search, to ponder, to grow in her love for learning.
Jan-Michal Ong (minor)
About
As Leo Tolstoy writes in What is Art, a truly great work is the conduit through which the artist communicates important feelings to his reader, who is subsequently infected with those sensibilities. Indeed, I am drawn to literature not only because it allows me to meditate on the essential questions of life – love, death, one’s reason for existence – but also for providing me with the opportunity to peer into the innermost depths of another’s soul. I daresay that I have resonated more deeply with certain fictional characters than I have even with my closest intimates.

I am chiefly interested in the intersections between history, literature and philosophy and believe that they work in tandem with each other in the effort to comprehend the human condition. My interests lie in the nineteenth-century European novel (and more broadly speaking, European thought), and I enjoy very much the works of writers such as Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Goethe, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.
See Wern Hao (minor)
Kevin Wong (minor)
About
Kevin is a fourth year student in the Double Degree Programme with Law, as well as a prospective Literature Major. Having grown up immersed in fantasy books, film, video games, and television. the Literature Major affords him a welcome opportunity to study language and the stories that people tell with it. He particularly enjoys grand tales of gods and heroes; of the rise and fall of empires; of the individual situated against the overwhelming forces of time, culture, and history.

Hoping to bring together both Law and Literature in his capstone project next year, Kevin has tentative plans to explore Ovidian epic and poetry for its legalistic valences in its coverage of mythological ‘property disputes’, with implications for classical rhetoric, the pseudo-legal status of the Roman gods, the concept of ownership, and fundamental ideas about natural justice.

Kevin has plans to pursue graduate school in the legal humanities, with an research interest on the intersection between legal, literary, and classical studies.

Outside of classes, he spends his time gaming, reading, and watching television – all preferably with a cup of bubble tea in hand.
Faris Joraimi
Adeline Loh
About
Adeline came to the realisation that she wouldn’t mind doing literature for the rest of her life in junior college and has never looked back since. She is drawn by the way literature connects people from vastly different backgrounds and how it continuously shapes the way she views the world. Her interests lie in interrogating the intersections of the postcolonial, feminism, and ethics in literary works and what they teach us about being human. As an Arts and Humanities minor with a focus on creative writing, she spent a summer writing poetry in Greece on the college’s Writing Fellowship and hopes to branch out into creative nonfiction next. Beyond her literary pursuits, she spends her spare time on her hobbies which include making tea, cooking noodles, and doing laundry.
Nigel Loh
Kukhanya Magubane
Kelly Ng
Sidharth Praveen
Lisa Tan
Yap Jia Yi
Isabel Chua (minor)
Esther Foo (minor)
Ignatius Koh (minor)
Brandon Lim (minor)
Chloe Lim (minor)
Mathias Ooi (minor)
Tan Qian Hui (minor)
Teo Wen Min (minor)
Peh Yi Lin (minor)
Nicholas Quek (minor)
Adair Simpson (minor)
Prairie Soh (minor)
Jason Yeung (minor)

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Literature

Our Students

Chrystal Ho Jia Min

Class of 2019

Macca Lee Xinlei

Class of 2019

Qi En Teoh (minor)

Class of 2019

Michelle Lee

Class of 2019

Chow Huiru

Class of 2020

Shawn Hoo

Class of 2020

Carson Huang

Class of 2020

Kan Ren Jie

Class of 2020

Heeeun (Monica) Kim

Class of 2020

Madison Lommen

Class of 2020

Lu Yi

Class of 2020

Yogesh Tulsi

Class of 2020

Wong Shiying

Class of 2020

Capucine Barcellona (minor)

Class of 2020

Julia Chin (minor)

Class of 2020

Audrey Lim (minor)

Class of 2020

Jan-Michal Ong (minor)

Class of 2020

See Wern Hao (minor)

Class of 2020

Kevin Wong (minor)

Class of 2020

Faris Joraimi

Class of 2021

Adeline Loh

Class of 2021

Nigel Loh

Class of 2021

Kukhanya Magubane

Class of 2021

Kelly Ng

Class of 2021

Sidharth Praveen

Class of 2021

Lisa Tan

Class of 2021

Yap Jia Yi

Class of 2021

Isabel Chua (minor)

Class of 2021

Esther Foo (minor)

Class of 2021

Ignatius Koh (minor)

Class of 2021

Brandon Lim (minor)

Class of 2021

Chloe Lim (minor)

Class of 2021

Mathias Ooi (minor)

Class of 2021

Tan Qian Hui (minor)

Class of 2021

Teo Wen Min (minor)

Class of 2021

Peh Yi Lin (minor)

Class of 2021

Nicholas Quek (minor)

Class of 2021

Adair Simpson (minor)

Class of 2021

Prairie Soh (minor)

Class of 2021