Department of English

Shirley TungShirley Tung

 

Associate Professor / Graduate Faculty
Ph.D. 2015, University of California, Los Angeles; M. St. 2005, Oxford University.

Email: sftung@ksu.edu
Office: English/Counseling Services Bldg. 221
Phone: (785) 532-6716

Fields of interest:
17th c. British Literature; Restoration and 18th c. British Literature; Life Writing; Gender Studies.

Shirley F. Tung specializes in 17th-century and 18th-century British Literature. She is currently completing two books: an academic monograph on how 18th-century travel narratives function as a crucial site for the mediation of personal and national identity, and a trade biography on John Milton's time as a pamphleteer during the English Civil War.

Dr. Tung's work on the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century has been featured in The Age of Johnson, Eighteenth-Century Studies, European Romantic Review, Huntington Library Quarterly, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Restoration: Studies in Literary Culture, 1660-1700, and Studies in English Literature 1500-1900. Fascinated by intertextuality as literary and socio-cultural critique as well as a form of authorial self-fashioning, her research spans the genres of criminal biography, epic and occasional poetry, periodicals and print media, and travel writing.

Within the classroom, Dr. Tung uses various historical artifacts, textual genres, digitized repositories, and modern media—graphic art, music, film, TV, and the internet—to make relevant connections between the long eighteenth century and our current cultural moment. In particular, her recent courses on celebrity culture focus on the intersections between Enlightenment philosophies of the self, the performance of identity and public intimacy in 18th-century life writing, and self-curated narratives on 21st-century social media platforms. At Kansas State, she has developed a student-centered pedagogy that equips undergraduates and graduates with scholarly tools, such as archival research skills, in order to pursue unique and independent lines of inquiry. This approach has resulted in her students producing a wide array of public humanities projects that reach audiences well beyond her classroom in the form of digital humanities resources, podcasts, YouTube documentaries, and op-eds.

Dr. Tung is the recipient of the following research fellowships and teaching awards:

  • 2023 Short-Term Research Fellowship, New York Public Library
  • 2023 Clark Short-Term Fellowship, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA
  • 2022 British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (BSECS)-Bodleian Fellowship, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
  • 2022-24 Visiting Scholarship, Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, Wolfson College, University of Oxford
  • 2020-21 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) Innovative Course Design Award.
  • 2020 Ron Gaches Award for Undergraduate Teaching
  • Student Association of Graduates in English (SAGE) Graduate Faculty Awards for Distinguished Teaching (2019-20) and Distinguished Service (2020-21)