#  Julia Ng 

 

 



   ![Julia-Ng_0.jpg](/sites/g/files/omnuum4936/files/styles/hwp_4_5__480x600/public/Julia-Ng_0_6.jpg?itok=pif5X1AH) 

 



 





 

Julia Ng received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University in 2012 with a dissertation on Walter Benjamin's mathematical revision of the formal possibility of Kant's perpetual peace project. Her research, which centers on the early twentieth-century afterlives of late eighteenth-century political and literary theory, examines the self-consciously impossible character of Kant's projection of the just society. Fictions and failures, she argues, accompany and precede every determination of possibility imposed by the self-organization of embodied subjectivity, and ironically make possible alternative theories of political agency that do not rely on the presumption that human beings can build a world in which they protect themselves from every conceivable threat. Her current project, "Body, Force, Right: Towards a Literary Theory of Posthumous Life," tracks a change between 1800 and 1900 in the conception of "life" that exceeds what is deemed "possible" for human subjectivity, uncovering a cosmic perspective on the meaning of the word "life"—life at its bare minimum, or as Heidegger put it, "life as it bodies forth"—in the "posthumous work" of Kant, Novalis, Nietzsche, and George.

 

 

 





 

 

- ## Discipline
    
     [Literature](/disciplines/comparative-literature)
- ## Fellowship
    
     [Postdoctoral](/fellowship/postdoctoral)
- ## Fellowship Year
    
     [2012 - 2013](/fellowship-year/2012-2013)
- ## Role
    
     [Fellows](/role/fellow)