Zachary Sng
Assistant Professor:
German Studies
Phone: 401-8633002
Zachary_Sng@brown.edu
Zachary Sng works on the literature and philosophy of Britain and Germany around the 18th century, covering the intellectual and literary movements of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. His other interests include rhetoric, semiotics, and the history of aesthetics.
Biography
Zachary Sng was born and grew up in Singapore. He enrolled at Brown University in 1990 and obtained his A.B. in 1993 and his M.A. in 1994. After college, he worked as a high-school teacher in Singapore, teaching English literature.
From 1998 to 2004, he was a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the University of Konstanz in Germany.
Dr. Sng joined the Brown faculty in Fall 2004.
Interests
Dr. Sng has just completed a book, The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist, which looks at some important literary and philosophical texts from Germany and England. In the book, which will appear with Stanford University Press next year, he explores the relationship between language and understanding through the figure of error, and examines how authors claim to generate knowledge out of and about error in the period between the Enlightenment and Romanticism.
He is also working on a new project involving moderation, mediation, and other figurations of the "middle" in the 18th century.
Degrees
Ph.D. (Comparative Literature)
Awards
- 2002: Doctoral Fellow of the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD)
- 2003-04: Member of the Graduate Research Group (Graduiertenkolleg) on "The Figure of the Third," University of Konstanz, Germany
- Summer 2005: Guest at the Network Transatlantic Cooperation, University of Konstanz,Germany
- Spring 2007: Faculty Fellow at the Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University
- 2008-09: John Rowe Workman Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the Humanities
Affiliations
- The Modern Language Association
- The German Studies Association
- The Network for Transatlantic Cooperation (University of Konstanz, Germany
Teaching
Zachary Sng teaches courses in the Departments of German Studies and Comparative Literature, with a focus on German literature and aesthetics. He particularly enjoys small seminars that allow for close readings and discussions of interesting literary and philosophical texts.
Funded Research
Wayland Collegium Curricular Development Grant ($2250), 2008
Curriculum Vitae
