Student Academic Publications

Yale-NUS students found an additional outlet for their academic talents through a number of publications produced at the College.

These included journals with full academic formatting, less formal publications such as magazines, and publications produced specifically for a single class.

Contributing to these publications offered students valuable learning experiences, such as the opportunity to improve their writing and practice producing publishable texts. They were also able to familiarise themselves with the processes of submitting, revising and editing materials for publication.

The Yale-NUS Undergraduate Journal

The Yale-NUS Undergraduate Journal (YNUJ) provided a platform for some of the best undergraduate research and writing produced by the College’s students.

Published by the student-led Yale-NUS College Society for Academic Research (YNSAR), the first volume was produced in November 2016, and featured eight academic articles contributed by Yale-NUS students.

Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the Yale-NUS curriculum, the articles covered a wide range of disciplines, including literature, philosophy and urban studies.

The range of subjects covered in the Journal is reflective of the complexity of the Yale-NUS curriculum.

Founding Yale-NUS President Professor Pericles Lewis commented at the journal’s launch.

YNUJ Vol I

The first volume’s topics included the use of similes in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the relevance of comic book superheroes to notions of justice, and ghost towns in China. Besides demonstrating breadth in subject matter, the articles showed the in-depth specialist knowledge required for academic work.

YNUJ Vol II

In an endeavour to transform the Journal into a home for undergraduate research throughout Southeast Asia, the second volume—published in 2018—expanded the Journal’s scope to include contributions from students from other universities in the region.

YNUJ Vol III

The third volume was also published in 2018, with articles covering issues from around the world, including Spain, Jordan, British India, Bangladesh and Singapore.

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The journal granted students the opportunity to experience the processes involved in high-level research, peer-review assessment and academic publication, with the aim of nurturing a community of scholars and showcasing and promoting interest in academic work.

To produce the journal, the students of the YNSAR Executive Committee worked alongside faculty members who reviewed submissions to ensure high academic standards were upheld.

[Academic research] develops intellectual self-confidence and, from time to time, brings you the satisfaction of discovering something new, solving a tough problem, or expressing yourself well.

—YNUJ’s Faculty Advisor, Professor of Political Science Terry Nardin.

The Dante Journal of Singapore

The Dante Journal of Singapore contained essays written by students for the Literature seminar YHU2230 Dante and the European Middle Ages, taught by Associate Professor of Humanities (Literature) Andrew Hui.

Each essay explored a different facet of Dante Alighieri’s 14^th century Italian poem Divine Comedy (Commedia).

Knowing their work would be preserved in this volume, students took extra care over their contributions, making their essays “exponentially better” and “pieces of undergraduate research that make a real contribution to the 700-year old tradition of Dante scholarship.” (Associate Professor Hui).

One goal was to help students “learn the process of journal submission, revision, and peer review [and] the student editors learn the process of running a journal. These are essential skills not only for the students who wish to go on to graduate school, but also for any professional field involving writing.” (Associate Professor Hui)

The Dante Journal of Singapore, Vol I

Volume I was published in 2017 and contained six essays from the 2015/2016 Academic Year. The volume was beautifully illustrated with images from The Divine Poem of Dante Alighieri, after the British draughtsman John Flaxman.

The Dante Journal of Singapore, Vol II

Eight student essays from the 2018/2019 Academic Year were included in Volume II (2020). This volume’s essays were accompanied by illustrations from Salvador Dalí’s The Divine Comedy.

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As contributors, we learned to situate ourselves in a lineage of thoughts—

thoughts of those who have come before us, in the secondary literature, and of those who did this with us: our professor and peers. To do independent research amidst all those voices is to balance what we learned from others with what we have learned by ourselves. Above all, we sought to bring to you, our reader, the immensely rich tradition of Dantean studies, and to put in our own words why this divine poem still rings true.

—Vol. I editors, Thu Truong (Class of 2018) and Carmen Denia (Class of 2017).

The essays here reflect each scholar’s unique style, thoughts, and epiphanies upon their first encounter with the Commedia.

From the classical to the contemporary, literary to philosophical, vertical to horizontal readings, the essays that we have for you are but a slice of what our seminars look like. Reflected in our wide mix of essay topics, selections from the Commedia, and scholastic lenses, this collection is a microcosm of the diverse community that we have here at Yale-NUS.

—Vol. II editors, Carson Huang (Class of 2020) and Kevin Wong (Class of 2020).

The Hawker

The Hawker was a magazine where students, staff and faculty could showcase their academic and creative writing talents.

It was published twice every semester between 2016 and 2020 by the College’s Writers’ Centre.

Initially a vehicle for writing advice from the Writers’ Centre staff and faculty, The Hawker developed over its lifetime to include more student academic work in the form of stories, poems, articles, essays, travel diaries, photo-essays and more.

Read The Hawker Collection

The Mocker

The Hawker was not always serious, as was seen in 2019 when the Writers’ Centre joined forces with the College’s satirical magazine The Mocktant to create a special edition titled The Mocker.

Oppression and Injustice

Oppression and Injustice was a textbook written and edited by the students of the 2018 course YHU2280 Oppression and Injustice, a Philosophy course focusing on theories of resisting injustice.

Led by Assistant Professor of Humanities (Philosophy) Robin Zheng, the course examined themes of intersectionality and epistemology, and education and liberation, through traditions of Black feminist and postcolonial Latin American thought.

Supported by the Yale-NUS Teaching Innovation Grant, this student-led project encouraged going beyond passive learning to the active production of knowledge, with a focus on detailing the types, causes and methods to resist oppression.

By producing a textbook showcasing historically underrepresented voices with the intent of educating actual readers, they exercised analytical and writing skills in service of the larger real-world project of overcoming injustice, which was the central subject matter of the course.

—Assistant Professor Robin Zheng.

Oppression and Injustice

“Through the project, students needed to understand themselves not just as consumers but also producers of knowledge, to recognize the authority and responsibility they possess in virtue of their position in the academy, and to critically reflect on processes of knowledge production that form the basis of their own education.”

—Assistant Professor Robin Zheng.

girlgirlgirl

The girlgirlgirl zine was produced by students of the YHU2311 Girlfriends: Narratives of Friendship class, led by Lecturer of Humanities (Writing and Literature) Dr Carissa Foo. The class looked at female friendship through the lens of literature.

Taking inspiration from the literature they read for class, traditional magazines aimed at a female readership and contemporary magazines such as Teen and Teenage, the students worked in pairs to develop the content, reflecting the class’s emphasis on friendship and collaboration.

Much discourse on friendship has been centred on male comradeship, citizenship, and homosociality.

Women’s friendship, on the other hand, is often framed as temporal, associated with youth and a rite of passage or social education that prepares the woman for society and marriage. Reading women’s literature, students in this course will attend to the nuances and complexities of feminine relations, be they antagonistic or amicable, familial or fraught, in an attempt to formulate for themselves the literary and filmic representations of girlfriendships.

—Dr Carissa Foo.

girlgirlgirl, Issue 2311

The first issue was published in 2020, blending together stories, drawings, photographs, playlists, interviews and quizzes to explore the nuances and complexities of female friendships in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic.

girlgirlgirl, Issue 2322

A second issue was published in 2022, with a familiar mix of formats and styles, but this time focusing on female friendships ‘laced with memory and nostalgia’ in a post-pandemic world.

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A Compilation of Selected Works from Daily Themes

Daily Themes was a compilation of writing by the students of Senior Lecturer of Humanities (Creative Writing) Lawrence Ypil’s YHU2286 Daily Themes class.

Students were asked to respond to writing prompts with short texts five days a week for a whole 13-week semester, producing 65 pieces in total.

A Compilation of Selected Works from Daily Themes

The results embraced a range of subjects and styles in prose and poetry, including personal confessions, family reminiscences and poetic musings.

This selection of works was collated from the Spring 2018 class.