Head of Studies (History), Yale-NUS College
Claudine Ang, Associate Professor of Humanities (History), joined Yale-NUS College as part of its inaugural faculty in 2012. During this heady time of founding, she came together with other intrepid faculty members to build an innovative, cosmopolitan institution. Teaching on the Literature and Humanities and the Historical Immersion teams, she has sought to help students develop intellectual agility and independent mindedness. In recognition of her contributions, she was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2023.
Associate Professor Ang first became interested in the study of Southeast Asia as an undergraduate at the National University of Singapore, where she received her BA (Hons) from the Department of Southeast Asian Studies and her MA from the Department of History. Focusing on Vietnamese History, Southeast Asian History, and Modern Chinese History, she completed her doctoral studies in the Department of History at Cornell University (2012). Her dissertation, entitled ‘Statecraft on the Margins: Drama, Poetry, and the Civilizing Mission in Eighteenth-Century Vietnam’, was awarded the Lauriston Sharp Dissertation Prize.
One of the abiding interests of Associate Professor Ang is the relationship between language and the construction of cultural hierarchies. Her first book Poetic Transformations: Eighteenth-Century Cultural Projects on the Mekong Plains was published by the Harvard University Asia Center Publications in 2019. Currently, she is working on another book, On Listening and Dissonance, in which she seeks to understand how kings listen to their subjects, how the vernacular spins tales about the classical, how the living communicate with the dead, and how dreamers eavesdrop on themselves in their reveries.
