Dr Jenna Ng

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Profile

Biography

PhD (University College London)

PGDip (Queen Mary, University of London)

MA (University College London)

LLB (National University of Singapore)

After law school, qualifying for the Singapore Bar and a brief bout practising as a finance lawyer at major law firms in Singapore and London, I decided to do something different and obtained a PhD in Film Studies from University College London (UCL), writing my doctoral thesis on digital cinema technologies. Prior to joining York, I held research posts as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge University (Visiting Fellow, Wolfson College), and as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at HUMlab (dually affiliated with the Department of Culture and Media), Umeå University, Sweden. In all, I have lived in Singapore; London; Hong Kong; Sweden; Cambridge and now York, and am fluent in both Mandarin and English.

My academic honours include the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, the Overseas Research Scholarship (ORS) Award, the UCL Graduate School Research Scholarship, the UCL Graduate Open Scholarship, and the Singapore Academy of Law Prize (top final-year graduate of the class). More recently, I have also won various awards and prizes for my research, including an Honourable Mention award for Best First Monograph by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS), and the Special Jury Prize at the Learning on Screen Awards 2023.

In 2018, I was awarded the University of York Rewarding Excellence Award for my demonstration of academic leadership as well as the University of York Vice-Chancellor's Teaching Award for achievement of teaching excellence. I have been nominated several times by students for a University of York Students' Union (YUSU) Excellence Award in various categories, including "Inspirational Lecturer", "Teacher of the Year", "Supervisor of the Year", and "Promoting Equality and Diversity". In 2020, I was nominated in and received a "Highly Commended" in the "Most Inspiring" category of the 2020 YUSU Excellence Awards.

Departmental roles

At the School of Arts and Creative Technologies, I am a member of the founding team which set up the Interactive Media BSc programme at York and was first Deputy Programme Leader, then Programme Leader, from 2016-19, and Programme Leader again from October 2020 - December 2020. From 2015-17, I set up and was Chair of the School of Arts and Creative Technologies Ethics Committee. From 2016-19, I was also the Faculty Representative (Arts and Humanities) of the York Graduate Research School Policies and Programmes Sub-Committee. My other previous citizenship roles include being an Admissions Tutor for the Interactive Media BSc programme, as well as a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PGCAP) mentor. I am currently Chair of the School of Arts and Creative Technologies Board of Studies, which is the primary learning and teaching committee at the School level.

I have designed and taught a wide range of cinema and digital media courses, including convening and teaching the module, "Coding the Frame: Space and Time with Digital Media", for the Screen Media and Cultures MPhil at Cambridge, and have supervised several MPhil essays and theses. I currently convene and teach two of the humanities modules on the Interactive Media BSc - "Digital Culture, Aesthetics and Storytelling"; and "The Future of Story: Storytelling in the Digital Age" (offered cross-programme). I also supervise final-year dissertations and projects.

Research

Overview

I work primarily on theoretical, cultural and critical analyses intersecting digital and visual culture, with particular interests in digital imaging, screen cultures and interactive storytelling. My research interests also include the posthuman, the postdigital, computational culture and the digital humanities.

I have delivered over 20 invited keynotes, lectures and presentations. Major lectures include the keynotes for the 2020 Screen Studies Research in a Pandemic training event at the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts Southeast England (CHASE); the 2019 Milan Machinima Festival at IULM University; and the 2015 Glasgow Postgraduate Research Symposium. In May 2022, I was interviewed on France24 on virtual entertainment. In 2012, I was a visiting researcher at the Centre for Cinema Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada; in 2014 and 2018, I was awarded competitive visiting stipends to be a visiting scholar at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter, respectively.

My first book, an edited collection titled Understanding Machinima: essays on filmmaking in virtual worlds (Bloomsbury) on the remediation of machinima in avant-garde art, cinema, pedagogy, puppetry, game art, performance, documentary, was published in 2013 as a multimedia academic collection of essays incorporating QR codes and mobile digital content. This collection has been favourably reviewed as "an excellent complement to introductory texts on machinima because it offers a timely exploration of many aspects of machinima that will not be found in most other works on the subject." From another reviewer: "this well-directed dialogue among the authors reveals the complexity of the analysed issues, making for a work that is much more than the sum of the parts.”

My second book is a substantive monograph titled The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), which develops new theories of the surfaces on and spaces in which images are displayed, interrogating contemporary contestations of reality against illusion, and evoking screen boundaries as the instrumentation of intense virtualizations which are also part of media gluttony, post-truth and dis/misinformation. The book was awarded Honourable Mention in the category of Best First Monograph by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS). Judges praised the book as "a nuanced and rich exploration of new theories of image making and their projections".

My third book will be about the existential tensions of living in the age of Artificial Intelligence. In the meantime, I have also published widely on digital culture and cinema in numerous edited collections and academic journals, including Cinema Journal, Animation, Games and Culture, and Screening the Past.

I was a Co-Investigator on two AHRC-funded projects, "Pararchive" (£400,000), and its follow-up project, "Digital Community Workspaces" (£100,000), both based at the University of Leeds, which aims to co-produce an open digital platform for the creative remediation of archival resource by communities. My other competitive grant awards include a Social Media Knowledge Exchange Scholarship (funded by the AHRC) and successful internal pump priming applications both at York and Cambridge. In 2013, I was the project leader of "Digital Bridges: 'Have You Forgotten Your Password'", an AHRC-funded knowledge exchange project working with playwrights and theatre practitioners at the Watford Palace Theatre, developing a digital art installation in conjunction with the plays and organising outreach workshops during the theatre's season on digital society and culture.

Supervision

I supervised numerous MPhil dissertations at Cambridge. At York, I am currently supervising or co-supervising four PhD students and three Masters by Research students working on topics including the cultural value of open air cinema; algorithmic culture; interactivity in interactive performance; the presentation of the self in digital media; story spaces of interactive narratives; and the audio-visual language of brand films. I have supervised two Masters by Research and three PhD students to completion, two of whom are now in permanent lectureship posts.

I am particularly interested in supervising PhD projects on digital media and culture; digital cinema and imaging technologies; video games and digital culture; posthumanism; post-digital culture; and the philosophy of cinema.

Publications

Selected publications

Creative Work

Ng J. and Tomkins, O., "The New Virtuality: A Creative Website on Blurred Boundaries Between the Real and Unreal", MAST 4(1), 2023: 96-108.

Video essay: "The New Virtuality: A Video Essay on the Disappearing Differences Between Real and Unreal", Screenworks (forthcoming). Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Learning on Screen Awards 2023.

Books

Ng, J., The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 282, 2021. Reviews available on the journals of New Techno-Humanities and Afterimage. Awarded Honourable Mention in the category of Best First Monograph by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS).

Ng, J. (ed.) Understanding Machinima: essays on filmmaking in virtual worlds, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 246, 2013. Review available on The Italian Journal of Game Studies.

Chapters in books

Ng, J., "The Interactive Letter: Co-Authorship and Interactive Media in Emily Short's First Draft of the Revolution", in Teri Higgins and Catherine Fowler (eds), Epistolary Entanglements in Film, Media and the Visual Arts, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 173-189, 2023.

Ng, J. and Popple, S., "'People Inside': Creating Digital Community Projects on the YARN Platform", in Anne Schwan and Tara Thomson (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Digital and Public Humanities, London; New York: Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 357-376, 2022.

Ng, J., "Where the Violence Lies: Re-reading Rape and Revenge in Freeze Me (Takashi Ishii, 2000)", in Stephanie Patrick and Mythili Rajiva (eds), The Forgotten Victims of Sexual Violence in Film, Television and New Media: Turning to the Margins, Cham: Palgrave, 179-202, 2022.

Ng, J., “An Alternative Rationalization of Creative AI by De-Familiarizing Creativity: Towards an Intelligibility of Its Own Terms”, in Pieter Verdegem (ed.), AI for Everyone: Critical Perspectives, London: University of Westminster Press, 49-66, 2021.

Ng, J. and Goldberg, D. Theo, “Algorithmic Studies”, in Braidotti, Rosi and Hlavajova, Marisa (eds), Posthuman Glossary, London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 26-27, 2018.

Ng, J., “Machinima”, in Lowood, Henry and Guins, Raiford (eds), Debugging Game History: A Lexicon, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 287-296, 2016.

Ng, J., “The Cut Between Us: Digital Remix and the Expression of Self”, in David Theo Goldberg and Patrik Svensson (eds), Between Humanities and the Digital, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 217-228, 2015.

Peer-reviewed articles

Ng, J. and Carter, R., "Wayfaring in Space: Story as Environmental Encounters in Ruins (2011) and Sacramento (2016)", New Techno-Humanities, 2022, first published online.

Newsome-Ward, T. and Ng, J., “Between Subjectivity and Flourishing: Creativity and Game Design as Existential Meaning”, Games and Culture, 17(4), 2022, 552-575.

Luik, J., Hook, J. and Ng, J., “Framing the Startup Accelerator Through Assemblage Theory: An ethnographic study of an intensive hub in Indonesia”, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media, 0(0), 2021, 1-7.

Ng, J. and Barrett, J., “The Half-Imagined Past: The Audio-Depiction of 1960s Capitalism and Freedom in the Music of Wolfenstein: The New Order and Mad Men”, Kinephanos: Journal of Media Studies and Popular Culture, Vol. 6, Issue 1, December 2016.

McKeown, C. and Ng, J., “‘You have all the weapons you need’ – Sucker Punch and the Multiform Gaze”, The Computer Games Journal, Vol. 3, Issue 2, October 2014, 54-63.

Ng, J., “Surface, Display, Life: Re-thinking the Screen from Projection to Video Mapping”, Archives of Design Research, 27(1), 2014, 72-91.

Ng, J., “Seeing Movement: On Performance Capture Imagery and James Cameron’s Avatar”, Animation, Vol. 7, No. 3, November 2012, 273-286.

Full publications list

For a full list of my publications, please visit the York Research Database.

External activities

Memberships

I am a member of various professional societies, including the Law Society of Singapore and the Singapore Academy of Law. I am also an Advocate and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Singapore.

At Cambridge, I was a member of the Social Media Knowledge Exchange (SMKE) Steering Committee, a collaborative project based at the University of Cambridge on social media research and learning, as well as a member of the Cambridge Digital Humanities Steering Committee, overseeing the setting up of a formal and comprehensive DH network in the Cambridge area, principally across University of Cambridge.

In 2018, I am a member of the founding team which started Bi'an, a UK Chinese Writers' Network funded by Arts Council England.

Examinerships

I am an external examiner for the BA Digital Media at the University of Roehampton (2019-present), as well as for the MA Media and Communication programme at the University of Liverpool (2019-2022). In 2018-19, I was an external validator/review assessor for the BA (Hons) Film and Media and BA/BA (Hons) Media and Communications programmes at Queen Margaret University. I have also been a PhD external examiner. Since 2018, I have been a juror for the annual Milan Machinima Festival Critics' Choice Award.