Andrew Hui received his BA from St. John’s College, Annapolis and PhD from Princeton University. He has also studied at the Yale Divinity School and the Scuola Normale of Pisa. He works mainly on European Renaissance literature, the afterlife of antiquity, and East/West cultural transmission.
His dissertation, entitled The Poetics of Ruins: Vestigia, Monuments and Writing Rome in Renaissance Poetry, proposes that the Renaissance was also a ruin-naissance—the birth of ruins as objects of contemplation that signaled the rupture from classical antiquity. The study focuses on the discourse of ruins—specifically those of Rome—from a poetic perspective, by taking three test cases—Petrarch, Du Bellay, and Spenser—and explores how these poets approached the remnants of antiquity, both literal and literary, from their respective national angles.
He has two other projects in mind: one, the role that the Chinese language played in the discourse of the ideal language in Early Modern Europe in thinkers such as John Wilkins, Athanasius Kircher, and G. W. Leibniz; second, the relationship between epic and epistemology—what poets know and what they don’t know—from Virgil to Milton.
Born in London, Andrew was raised in Hong Kong and Garland, Texas. When not reading the New York Times or surfing on Amazon.com, he likes watching Madmen, Friday Night Lights and the Office. He also knows a lot about fancy goldfishes.