Fellows » Current Fellows » IHUM Fellow: Andrew Hui, PhD
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, the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, and the Warburg Institute, London. He works mainly on European Renaissance literature, the afterlife of antiquity, and East/West cultural transmission.
His current book project, entitled The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature, proposes that the Renaissance was also a ruin-naissance—the birth of ruins as objects of contemplation that signaled the era’s rupture from classical antiquity. The study focuses on the discourse of fragmented remains of the past—specifically those of Rome—from a poetic perspective, by taking three words in three authors as test cases—vestigia in Petrarch, cendre in Du Bellay, and moniment in Spenser—and explores how these poets approached the remnants of antiquity, both literal and literary, from their respective national angles. Philology thus illuminates philosophy.
He has two other projects in mind: the first, tentatively entitled Sinographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe, is about the role that the Chinese language played in the discourse of the ideal language in thinkers such as John Wilkins, George Dalgarno, 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.