Philip Holden

Picture of Philip Holden

My life’s been marked by transitions and border crossings. I was born in Britain, spent most of my childhood moving from provincial town to provincial city, and went to London to university. In my 20s I travelled, working in theatre as a stage manager, and as a social worker with Vietnamese refugees, teaching in China and Taiwan, and studying further in the United States and Canada. I was something of an accidental academic: I didn’t really decide on this career until I was in my late twenties, and also always kept an interest in working outside the university,  on issues such as nuclear disarmament, HIV/AIDS, heritage, and, increasingly, mental health. But I think it was two years into my doctorate at the University of British Columbia, that I became serious about an academic career. I came to Singapore  after I graduated in 1994, teaching first at the National Institute of Education, and then moving to the National University of Singapore in 2000. I remain a Singapore permanent resident, still hope for citizenship, and Singapore is the place I feel most at home. I’m also very attached to another city that I have lived in over the years, to which I return from time to time, and in which I presently spend some time every year. That’s Vancouver, where I’m a settler, both in the actual sense of living uninvited on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations, and in a more abstract sense of still having to work hard at feeling at home.

I left my position at the National University of Singapore in 2018, and in 2019 returned to the University of British Columbia as a master’s student in Counselling Psychology,  exploring therapeutic forms of knowledge making. Since graduation, I’ve become interested in working at the intersection of counselling and storytelling, and at the same time continue research. In my previous three decades of scholarship I began by writing about literature’s relationship to discourses of sexuality, gender, and colonization, but increasingly focused on two areas of interest. The first was teaching and researching Singapore Literature, mostly in English, and considering how literary texts enable us to ask rich and unsettling questions about the social environments in which we find ourselves. The second was life writing or auto/biography studies, looking at how selves are made through processes of writing and reading. This is something that I’ve become increasingly interested in, and the knowledge I have makes connections with counselling through group work in areas such as Family of Origin and Life Writing.

I hope to continue to write at a slower pace for both academic and wider audiences, and my Full Academic Curriculum Vitae is attached here.

If you’re looking for short cuts to what I think of as my best work, here are a few thoughts. In Singapore studies, I’m probably most happy with some of my recent writings that move away from literary studies to think of social narratives, and the history of institutions of which I’ve been part. I have a brief essay on the problematics of Singapore’s “Third World to First” narrative in Loh Kah Seng, Thum Ping Tjin and Jack Chia’s edited collection Living With Myths in Singapore and two essays in Sojourn and Modern Asian Studies that form moments in an unwritten alternative history of the university in Singapore.

In auto/biography studies, the major work with which I’m most pleased is Autobiography and Decolonization, which looks at the way in which male political leaders in the process of decolonization represented themselves as national fathers, drawing parallels between their own lives and national narratives of emancipation and governance. I also like a later essay I wrote in which I became more self-reflexive about the process of writing: curiously enough, in the process of writing a biography that I could never complete. The last essay featured here begins to apply some of my new areas of knowledge to auto/biographical texts about Singapore.

My writing for wider audiences includes fiction, op eds for newspapers, and essays on the intersection of literature and society. I’ve selected here an essay on the problematics and pleasures of writing across different languages in Singapore, and also an early short story that’s available online, “Two Among Many,” published in Cha. My short story collection Heaven Has Eyes was published by Epigram in 2016, and I’m as happy with it as a record—through fiction’s distorting mirror—of a particular feeling, place, and time. I also made a short contribution to The Birthday Book in 2020, imagining a national therapy session for Singapore.

Some of these, and many of my other academic writings, are behind paywalls. If you need a copy, want to respond to anything, or simply spot a broken link, contact me at philip@pulauujong.org.