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Dr Julia Ng

Staff details

Dr Julia Ng

Position

Reader in Critical Theory and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought

Department

English and Creative Writing

Email

j.ng (@gold.ac.uk)

Goldsmiths Research Centres/Groups

Julia specialises in the history of critical theory and the links between philosophy, literature and modern mathematics.

In AY 2023-24, Julia is on research leave, courtesy of a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship.

Julia Ng is Reader in Critical Theory and founding Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought. She specialises in the links between modern mathematics, political thought, and theories of history and language in the 20th century, particularly in the work of Walter Benjamin. She is the co-editor (with Peter Fenves) of the critical edition of Walter Benjamin's “Toward the Critique of Violence” and associated fragments (2021), which contains her new translation of the essay, as well as an edition of Werner Hamacher’s writings on Friedrich Hölderlin (2020), both published with Stanford University Press. She is also the co-editor of Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, and the Marburg School: Special Issue of the Modern Language Notes 127.3 (2012). Prior to joining Goldsmiths, she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University.

Academic qualifications

  • PhD, Comparative Literary Studies (emphasis: German Literature and Critical Thought), Northwestern University
  • Joint BA/MA, Comparative Literature, University of California, Los Angeles
  • BA, Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of California, Los Angeles

Teaching and supervision

Julia teaches and convenes the critical theory modules on the MA Literary Studies programme and an UG module on post-Kantian aesthetics. She also convenes the MPhil/PhD in Literary and Critical Theory.

Julia is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Research interests

Julia has published widely on Benjamin's and Scholem's meta-mathematical engagements with neo-Kantianism, contemporaneous legal and political philosophy, and philosophy of history, beginning with a dossier of items recovered from the Scholem Archive and an accompanying article entitled "Kant's Theory of Experience After the War" that appeared in the special issue of MLN (127.3) she co-edited in 2012. She also contributes to the scholarship on modern Jewish political thought. Julia has written on Benjamin's critical altercations with Hermann Cohen, Leonard Nelson, and the French epistemologist and historian of science Émile Meyerson, as well as on Scholem's reception of Cantor and Bolzano, Scholem's significance for Agamben, and Benjamin's concept of justice in view of his philosophies of language and of thingly agency. A translator of Benjamin, Werner Hamacher and Friedrich Hölderlin, Julia's research is also concerned with philosophy's relation to the philological and with poetic modes of being, thinking, and acting.

Besides her study of Hölderlin's political-philosophical reception circa 1971, which served as the critical introduction to her translation of Hamacher's master's thesis Version of Meaning: A Study of Hölderlin's Late Lyric Poetry, she has written on Hölderlin's philosophy of nature and on synaesthesia in Sappho. She also contributes more broadly to literary and critical theory with work on Derrida, Agamben, Kant, Descartes, Shakespeare, Sterne, Kraus, Baudelaire, and figures of reversibility, undecidability, singularity, and the philosophical archive.

Funded by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, Julia is currently completing a book on Daoism and Capitalism based around Benjamin and Weber’s respective images of China ancient and modern.

Julia co-chairs the Walter Benjamin Research Network and serves on the boards of the series Walter Benjamin Studies for Bloomsbury Philosophy and Critical Theory for Inschibboleth edizioni.

Featured publications

Grants and awards

2023: British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship
Daoism and Capitalism: Early Critical Theory and the Global South (MCFSS23\230039)

2023: British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant
Daoism and Capitalism: Chinese Modernity in the Archives of Modern German Jewish Philosophy (SRG2223\230174)

2022: The Center for Jewish History - Fordham University Research Fellowship
“Daoism and Capitalism”

2022: British Society for the History of Philosophy Scholarly Activity Award
“Daoism and Capitalism”

2018: British Society of Aesthetics Small Grant
“Baudelaire and Philosophy”

2013: Charles Bernheimer Prize, American Comparative Literature Association

2012: Postdoctoral Fellowship, Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University

2011: Crown Family Center Fellowship for Jewish Studies, Northwestern University

2010: Josephine de Kármán Foundation Dissertation Fellowship

2009: Dissertation Year Fellowship, Northwestern University

2008: Fellowship, Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin

2007: Trustees Merit Citation, Carter Manny Award, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts

2007: Paris Program in Critical Theory Fellowship, Northwestern University

Publications and research outputs

Edited Book

Ng, Julia and Fenves, Peter, eds. 2021. Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition, by Walter Benjamin. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780804749527

Ng, Julia and Fenves, Peter, eds. 2020. Werner Hamacher. Two Studies of Friedrich Hölderlin. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 9781503611115

Edited Journal

Ng, Julia and Martel, James, eds. 2024. Singularity's -abilities: Special dossier on Samuel Weber, Modern Language Notes: Comparative Literature issue, . 0026-7910

Ng, Julia, ed. 2022. Special issue on 'Derrida's Geschlecht III', Paragraph, 45(3). 0264-8334

Ng, Julia and Mieszkowski, Jan, eds. 2021. Special Issue on "Reversibility", CR: The New Centennial Review, 21(1). 1532-687X

Book Section

Ng, Julia. 2022. 無人之徑: 本雅明、無為和資本主義批判 [Chinese translation of No One’s Way: Benjamin, wu wei, and the critique of capitalism]. Trans. He Yuan. In: Samuel Weber; Sha Li and Yong Zhao, eds. The Travels of Critical Theory: Between Aesthetics and Society. Beijing: Peking University Press, pp. 192-206. ISBN 9787301330326

Ng, Julia and Benjamin, Walter. 2021. [Translation] Toward the Critique of Violence. In: Julia Ng and Peter Fenves, eds. Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition, by Walter Benjamin. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, pp. 39-61. ISBN 9780804749527

Ng, Julia. 2021. Afterword — Toward Another Critique of Violence. In: Julia Ng and Peter Fenves, eds. Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition, by Walter Benjamin. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, pp. 113-160. ISBN 9780804749527

Article

Ng, Julia. 2024. Whistling Lillabullero. Modern Language Notes (Comparative Literature Issue), ISSN 0026-7910

Ng, Julia and Martel, James. 2024. Samuel Weber at 80. Modern Language Notes (Comparative Literature Issue), ISSN 0026-7910

Ng, Julia. 2023. The Action of Non-Action: Walter Benjamin, Wu Wei and the Nature of Capitalism. Theory, Culture & Society (Special Issue: Against Ontology: Chinese Thought and François Jullien), 40(4–5), pp. 219-238. ISSN 0263-2764

Conference or Workshop Item

Ng, Julia. 2024. 'Unlikely Possibility'. In: Time and Language: An Encounter Between Philosophy and Philology. University of California, Los Angeles, United States 10 - 11 May 2024.

Ng, Julia. 2024. 'Kafka's De and the Reverse of Return'. In: Chinese Modernity in German Jewish Thought. Senate House, London, United Kingdom 3 May 2024.

Ng, Julia. 2024. 'Daoism, Pluritemporality, Critique'. In: Experiment and Experience: A Polyphonic Seminar on the Dao of Indeterminacy. Collège International de Philosophie, France 14 March 2024.

Research projects

2023: Daoism and Capitalism: Early Critical Theory and the Global South
British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship MCFSS23\230039

2023: Daoism and Capitalism: Chinese Modernity in the Archives of Modern German Jewish Philosophy
British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant SRG2223\230174

Media engagements

2022: Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence at 100: A Roundtable Discussion.
Panel discussion on the new critical edition of Benjamin’s “Toward the Critique of Violence" (Stanford UP, 2021), hosted by the Institute for the Humanities, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.

2021: ZfL Berlin / Walter Benjamin Archiv - “Benjamin on Law”
Keynote lecture for conference on Working with Benjamin on Law, ZfL Berlin and Walter Benjamin Archiv

2021: Forum for Philosophy/LSE - Histories of Thinking Philosophy
Julia Ng, Jonathan Rée, and Justin E H Smith interrogate familiar narratives of philosophical history and explore more diverse, plural, and sometimes contradictory accounts of philosophical thought.

2021: Political Theory/Humboldt Universität Berlin - “Benjamin on Self-Defense and the Modern State.”
Symposium in Celebration of the 100th Anniversary of Walter Benjamin’s “Zur Kritik der Gewalt. Media response: https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-8948

2021: ICCTP/UC Berkeley - Book Forum on Pablo Oyarzún’s Doing Justice.
Critical South Book Conversations. International Consortium for Critical Theory Programs, UC Berkeley.

Conferences and talks

2022: “Hamlet through the Parlamonium.”
Shakespeare and the Frankfurt School. Shakespeare in Philosophy at Garrick’s Temple

2021: [Keynote lecture] “Benjamin on Law.”
Working with Benjamin on Law, Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL), Walter Benjamin Archiv Berlin, International Walter Benjamin Society (15-17 July, 2021)

2019: [Keynote lecture] “Surrealism and Catastrophe (Harnack, Auerbach, Benjamin).”
Futures of Catastrophe: Conceiving Crisis, Disaster and Prophecy from Interwar Germany to Contemporary Politics, Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven (11 December 2019)

2019: “Ancient Mexico and Natural History: Walter Benjamin’s Transition Problem.”
Department of Philosophy Lecture Series, University of Dundee / Scottish Centre for Continental Philosophy (6 November 2019)

2019: “Phrygian Nature.”
Nature Between Politics and Metaphysics: Reassessing German Idealism and Romanticism, Department of Philosophy, University of Padua (24-25 June 2019)

2019: “From ethnē to ethnē: notes on the emergence of a political value.”
Politics in the Age of the Double-bind: Anti-elitism and Anti-populism, School of Law, University of Kent (7 June 2019)

2019: “As You Like It: Benjamin’s Comic Infinite.”
Walter Benjamin and Shakespeare, Kingston Shakespeare Seminar (6 April 2019)

Supervision

Julia welcomes expressions of interest from students considering a PhD on any topic related to her areas of expertise.