Stephanie Ng

Stephanie Ng holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from University College London. Her thesis read contemporary women's writing to theorize compromise as a neoliberal technology, a liberal tenet, a gendered imperative, and an aesthetic practice. As a Visiting Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, she explored the ethics of authorship and assimilation in migrant mother-daughter dyads. Articles derived from her doctoral and post-doctoral years are forthcoming in the Journal of Romance Studies and Comparative Critical Studies. Stephanie extends her background in neuroscience and interest in affective belonging and political imaginaries to a transdisciplinary monograph. Co-authored with Assistant Professor of Genetics Kim Zayhowski, The Genomic Social Contract (University of California Press) asks what people concede in upholding institutions that promise to know them. At CLIC, Stephanie will develop a new project that maps implication across post-#MeToo women’s writing, film, and television. What happens when women feel they can no longer claim the status of innocent victim or external critic but must instead reckon with their own entanglement in the heteropatriarchal status quo? What happens when public doubt about women’s experiences is internalized as self-suspicion, compounding a pervasive sense of self-reproach? The project tracks how the implicated narrator avows her own moral pliancy and misrecognized culpability in gendered violence as a means of negotiating credibility and institutional legibility.