Dr. Beryl Pong
Biography
I am a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Intelligence, where I lead the Centre for Drones and Culture and the project "Droned Life: Data, Narrative, and the Aesthetics of Worldmaking."
I am also an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of English at Cambridge, in addition to holding affiliated positions with Trinity College, Cambridge, and with the Department of English, Linguistics, and Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore.
Previously, I was a Vice-Chancellor's Fellow and Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Sheffield. Before that, I held a research fellowship at Jesus College, Cambridge, and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto.
Research Interests
Twentieth- and twenty-first century Anglophone literature; visual culture; sound studies; philosophies of space and time; aesthetics; science and technology studies.
Areas of Graduate Supervision
I am happy to supervise in areas related to my research interests.
Connect with Beryl
Publications
Book
British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration. Mid-Century Studies Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Edited Book
Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology. Ed. Beryl Pong and Michael Richardson. Technographies Series (London: Open Humanities Press, 2024)
Edited Special Issues and Introductions
“The Art of Drone Warfare,” Journal of War and Culture Studies 15.4 (Autumn 2022): 377-87, ed. Beryl Pong. Contributors: Peter Burt / Drone Wars UK, Matthew Voice, Sophie Maxwell, Madonna Kalousian, Sophia Brown, Alex Adams.
“Wartime,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus 5.2 (2020), ed. Beryl Pong. Contributors: Randall Stevenson, Adam Piette, Nasser Mufti, Kent Puckett, Jane Hu, Kate McLoughlin, Paul Saint-Amour.
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
"Volumetric Mediations: Atmospheres of Crisis and Unbelonging in Humanitarian Drone Documentaries." Area (OnlineFirst, May, 2025).
"Big Data Visuality and Interstitial Spaces of Autonomy: Drones and Blockchains in and around Myanmar's Civil War." (co-written with Elliott Prasse-Freeman) Big Data & Society 12.1 (2025).
"Droned Attractions." Collateral, Collisions no. 108 (March 2025).
"'The Politics of the Faceless': Proliferated Drone's-Eye Views of Forced Migration." Cultural Politics 20.1 (2024): 112-135.
"Caring in the Mean/times." Modernism/modernity Print Plus 8.4 (2024).
“Reading Late Modern Wartime in the Anthropocene: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Little Girls.” PMLA 137.2 (March 2022): 262-78.
“Henry Green’s Pigeons.” Modernism/modernity Print Plus 4.3 (2019).
“The Archaeology of Postwar Childhood in Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness.” Journal of Modern Literature 37.3 (Spring 2014): 92-110.
“La France à l’heure Anglaise: Embodied Timescapes and Occupied Landscapes in Storm Jameson’s Cloudless May.” Literature & History 23.1 (Spring 2014): 33-48.
“Space and Time in the Bombed City: Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day.” Literary London Journal 7.1 (March 2009).
Book Chapters
“Orwell, War, and Violence.” The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell, ed. Nathan Waddell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025).
“‘The Zoom of a Hornet’: Virginia Woolf, Aural Biopolitics, and the Phenomenology of an Air Raid.” Literary Fiction and the Hearing Sciences, ed. Edward Allen (London: Routledge, 2023): 95-113.
“War and Peace.” The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Fernald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021): 440-55.
“The short story and the ‘little magazine.’” The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English, ed. Adrian Hunter and Paul Delaney (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018): 75-92.
Features
“The Aesthetics of Drone Warfare.” The British Academy Blog, 14 Sep. 2021.
“The Aesthetics of Drone Warfare: A Conversation with Tomas van Houtryve and Mahwish Chishty.” (co-written with Sophie Maxwell) ASAP/J, 8 Sep. 2020.
“How we experience pandemic time.” Oxford University Press Blog, 14 Jul. 2020.
“Excavating Blitz-Time.” Jesus College Annual Report, vol. 112 (2016), pp. 41-3.
Encyclopedia and Reference
“Blitz.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, ed. Stephen Ross (London: Routledge, 2018).
Reviews
Review of The View from Above in American Literature: Aerial Description, the Imaginary and the Form of Environment by David Rodriguez. Review of English Studies (OnlineFirst, March 2025).
Review of Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare by Katherine Chandler. Society & Space. 13 Jun 2022.
“Changing Nationhood, Changeless Place: Bill Brandt / Henry Moore at the Hepworth Wakefield Gallery.” Gallery review and book review of Bill Brandt / Henry Moore, edited by Martina Droth and Paul Messier. Modernism/modernity 27.3 (September 2020): 609-14.
Review of Liminality and the Short Story, ed. Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergman. Journal of the Short Story in English 69 (Fall 2017): 195-8.
Gallery review of Lee Miller: A Woman’s War (Imperial War Museum, London). Modernism/modernity 23.4 (November 2016): 905-10.
“Olivia Moaning.” Review of Olivia Manning: A Woman at War by Deirdre David and Imperial Refugee: Olivia Manning’s Fictions of War by Eve Patten. Women: A Cultural Review 24.4 (December 2013): 371-3.
“The Globalisation of Time.” Review of The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature by Adam Barrows. The Cambridge Quarterly 41.3 (September 2012): 389-95.