Philip Holden

I’m in transition at the moment, and sometimes call myself, rather wryly, a recovering academic. I was born in Britain, spent most of my childhood moving from provincial town to provincial city, and went to London to university. In my 20s I travelled, working in theatre as a stage manager, and as a social worker with Vietnamese refugees, teaching in China and Taiwan, and studying further in the United States. I was something of an accidental academic: I didn’t really decide on this career until I was in my late twenties, and also always kept an interest in working outside the university, on issues such as nuclear disarmament, HIV/AIDS, heritage, and, increasingly, mental health. But I think it was two years into my doctorate that I became serious about an academic career. I came to Singapore in after I graduated in 1994, teaching first at the National Institute of Education, and then moving to the National University of Singapore in 2000. I remain a Singapore permanent resident, and, if pushed, I’d still say Singapore’s my home. I’m also very attached to another city that I have lived in over the years, to which I return from time to time, and in which I presently live. That’s Vancouver, where I’m a settler, both in the actual sense of living uninvited on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations, and in a more abstract sense of still having to work hard at feeling at home.

I left my position at the National University of Singapore in 2018, and in 2019 returned to the University of British Columbia as a master’s student in Counselling Psychology, continuing a movement away from critical and towards therapeutic forms of knowledge making. In twenty-five years of scholarship I began by writing about literature’s relationship to discourses of sexuality, gender, and colonization, but increasingly focused on two areas of interest. The first was teaching and researching Singapore Literature, mostly in English, and considering how literary texts enable us to ask rich and unsettling questions about the social environments in which we find ourselves. The second was life writing or auto/biography studies, looking at how selves are made through processes of writing and reading. This is something that I’ve become increasingly interested in, and I am hoping that some of the knowledge I’ve gained will make connections with counselling.

If you’re looking for short cuts to what I think of as my best work, here are a few thoughts. In Singapore studies, I’m probably most happy with some of my recent writings that move away from literary studies to think of social narratives, and the history of institutions of which I’ve been part. I have a brief essay on the problematics of Singapore’s “Third World to First” narrative in Loh Kah Seng, Thum Ping Tjin and Jack Chia’s edited collection Living With Myths in Singapore and two essays in Sojourn and Modern Asian Studies that form moments in an unwritten alternative history of the university in Singapore.