Lecture Series: Julia Ng

Julia Ng 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 has published archival documents of Benjamin’s and Scholem’s meta-mathematical engagement with neo-Kantianism in a special issue she co-edited (with Rochelle Tobias) on Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem and the Marburg School, which appeared with Modern Language Notes in 2012. Her research is also concerned with the relation of philosophy to philology in regard to poetic modes of being, thinking, and acting since the 18th century. Other projects include a study of the mathematical infinite in modern German-Jewish thought, and a project on Daoism and capitalism based around Benjamin and Weber’s respective images of China ancient and modern. 

 

Julia is convenor of the MA Cultural Studies programme and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought. She co-chairs the Walter Benjamin London Research Network, and serves on the editorial board of the series Walter Benjamin Studies for Bloomsbury Philosophy. 

 

Julia Ng received her PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University in 2012, and a joint BA and MA in Comparative Literature from UCLA in 2002. Her doctoral thesis, on Benjamin’s mathematical revision of the formal possibility of Kant’s perpetual peace project, was awarded the 2013 Charles Bernheimer Prize by the American Comparative Literature Association. Prior to Goldsmiths she was a postdoctoral fellow of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University.