Lay Sion Ng
Lay Sion NG has been serving as an Assistant Professor of American Literature at the English Literature Department at Sophia University in Japan since April 2025. She holds a BA in British Literature (Fukushima University), MA and PhD in American Literature (Osaka University). Her academic interests include Hemingway studies, environmental humanities, material ecocriticism, and posthumanism, among others. She has a forthcoming book entitled Hemingway, Ecology and Culture: Re-reading Hemingway in the Anthropocene (Bloomsbury Academic’s Environmental Cultures Series). Her latest publications include “Teaching ‘Indian Camp’ in the Japanese Classroom” in Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice (2023), “Toward a Politics of Cure: Jake Barnes’s Embracing of Otherness in The Sun Also Rises” in Hemingway Review (2022), and “The Rotten Matter in A Farewell to Arms: An Ecological Gothic Reading” in F1000Resarch (2021).
Sessions in which Lay Sion Ng attends
Wednesday 7 May, 2025
2026 will mark the 20th anniversary of the launch of The Senses and Society and coining of the term ‘sensory studies.’ Senses and Society was founded by Michael Bull and David Howes (who have alternated in the role of Managing Editor every 3-4 years) and Doug Kahn and Paul Gilroy. The term sensory studies was selected (over e.g. ‘sensography’) and used in the title of the inaugural article, ‘Introducing Sensory Studies,’ in order to serve as an umbrella term for the multiple sub...
Thursday 8 May, 2025
Annabel Castro ∆ (Cinema and Communication, Universidad de Monterrey, Mexico)Sensing the Borderland in the Work of Female Writers from Northern Mexico and South AsiaThe objective of this paper is to analyze the role of multisensorial representation in producing the reader’s borderland experience. It focuses on literary work by female authors from Northern Mexico and South Asia. Particularly on specific texts by Juana Adcock, Orfa Alarcón, Patricia Laurent, Ila Arab Mehta...
Elisabeth Tangerner √ (History (Medieval History), University of Salzburg, Austria)Sensing the Divine: Sensory Experience and Space in the Late Medieval Benedictine Abbey of Lambach (Austria)In the cloistered worlds of late medieval monastic life, sensory perception had a decisive inpact on the spiritual experience and communal identity of conventuals. This paper explores how sensory worlds were created, experienced and discussed in the Benedictine Abbey of Lambach (Upper...
Friday 9 May, 2025
Silvina Katz (Open University, UK)Sensing to Translate: A Reading of Silvina Ocampo’s Short Story “La Calle Sarandi”Literary translators need to be able to sense or ‘feel’ a text in order to generate an emotionally resonant target text in translation, however, the ineffable nature of atmospheres in short stories can make this task difficult. This study explores the complex process of identifying sensory cues in literary works, focusing on Silvina Ocampo’s unsettling short...
Saturday 10 May, 2025
Clare Walker ∆ (Sociology & Anthropology, Concordia University, Canada)Feminine Value.s: Locating the Senses in Wellness’s Gendered CapitalismBuilding from my ethnographic fieldwork, I place the sensory elements of the female- dominated wellness community in Paris, France at the forefront of a broader analysis of wellness capitalism and (post)feminist aesthetics.Beginning with a discussion of two competing diet trends, I argue that the deployment of the senses in ...
Kristine Dizon (Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, Concordia University, Canada)Listening as Resistance: Decolonizing Sonic Poetry and the Politics of SoundThis presentation explores how decolonizing listening methodologies can serve as tools of resistance in sonic poetry. By examining the role of sound in reclaiming marginalized voices, this study argues that sonic poetry subverts traditional frameworks that often other non-Western practices. Using case studies such as Rose Co...