Beryl Pong

Bio

Beryl Pong is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. She holds affiliated positions with the Faculty of English at Cambridge and with the National University of Singapore. She is the author of British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration (Oxford University Press, 2020) and the co-editor of Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology (forthcoming, Open Humanities Press).

Contributions

Caring in the Mean/times

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My first book, British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration, was published in the Spring of 2020, when the first wave of the coronavirus hit the UK and we entered our first lockdown. Needless to say, it was not the historical season I imagined it to appear. The book is concerned with what I call late modernist chronophobia—a fear of the past and the future together—and with how individuals and the British state managed temporal anxieties in the years surrounding the...

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precarity time

Henry Green’s Pigeons

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Birds and certain varieties of birds have long been potent symbols related to war and conflict. But as airplane technologies developed in rapid tandem with the coming and arrival of the Second World War, the connection between avian and aviation reached new heights in the cultural imagination. The symbolism of doves, for instance, takes on unsettling connotations in T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” (1942), where a descending dove breaks through the air with flames of incandescent terror...

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technology air travel war