Carmen Thong is Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities (under the NUS Presidential Young Professorship scheme) and Director of the Southeast Asian Digital Humanities (SEADH) Lab at the National University of Singapore. She works in computational literary studies, postcolonial studies, sociology of literature, and cultural policy. Her current book project uses network models to examine how postcolonial novels are "discovered" within the global literary supply chain.
Her research is published with Modern Language Quarterly, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Medical Humanities, and World Literature in Motion (Columbia University Press). She also worked as a consultant with UNESCO on the 2005 Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, where she co-edited and co-authored a report on the African book industry. She graduated with a PhD in English and MA in Public Policy from Stanford University, where she was a Knight Hennessy scholar, Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow, and Mellon Dissertation Fellow.
My current book project examines the technologies that "discovers" some authors and literatures from the Global South and not others. My chapters index postcolonial texts as case studies and utilizes computational methods like network models to trace licensing routes, prize clusters, and policy effects such as import tariffs. It seeks solutions to expand the pipeline of authors and to redistribute resources to literary and cultural industries in postcolonial countries.
Book Project
