Postgraduate Students

April Thant Aung
Illness and Theatre in Singapore: Performance, Performativity and the Sick Role
Research Interests:
- Medicine and Theatre
- Performativity of Health and Sickness
- Representations of sickness on stage (Global and local illness plays)

Ivy Chua
Dignity, Voice, and Personhood in Pediatric Illness Narratives about Death and Dying
As a child has a limited capacity to act, medical decisions including the cessation of treatment are typically made by their parents. Additionally, mature pediatric patients also risk having their voice doubly negated as both a patient and a child. Pediatric illness narratives about terminal illness detail the complexities of a child’s phenomenological experience of sickness and dying. Such pathographies and fictional texts reveal that reinforcing the pediatric patient’s personhood heightens their sense of dignity and resilience at the end of life. These narratives offer fresh perspectives beyond the biomedical model’s narrow focus on curative treatment.
Ivy Chua is a Masters student at Nanyang Technological University, where her multi-disciplinary research examines dignity, voice, and personhood within pediatric illness narratives. Her research interests include pediatric illness, palliation, doctor-patient discourse, and mental health within contemporary literature.

Cat Chong
Cat Chong is currently a PhD student at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore where their work investigates stories of sickness in female authored Singaporean and SE Asian illness narratives. Her interests include ecology, feminism, contemporary poetics, and disability studies.
Their work will take a comparative approach to female authored illness narratives in Singapore and Southeast Asia I will investigate how intersections between gender and medicine have impacted the experience and written expression of illness within the genre of pathographies and illness narratives. To date, limited critical attention has been paid to illness narratives from outside of the UK and USA. Their research will therefore engage with the intellectual imperative to provide greater focus on Singaporean and South East Asian women’s writing within the emergent medical humanities field.

Bowen Geng
The translation history of Chinese Medicine texts
Research interests:
- Translation Studies
- Chinese Medicine
- Translation of Chinese Medicine

Melissa Ho
Autism Narratives in Singapore
Research Interests:
- Disability Studies
- Cultural and Textual Representations of Autism
- Autism in Singapore

Xiaoya Zhan
Xiaoya ZHAN is a current Ph.D. student at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. With the backgrounds in bioarchaeology and evolutionary anthropology, her research mainly focuses on the parasitic remains from archaeological contexts of ancient China. With the focus, she attempts to explore the health conditions, hygienic practice, daily behaviors, and migrations of ancient residents.