Dr Heidi Stalla

Heidi Stalla is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Yale-NUS College in Singapore where she teaches literature and creative writing courses. She publishes literary criticism and creative nonfiction and is now experimenting with the audio essay as a new form of criticism. She joins the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing to work on an object-biography of modernist writer Ling Shu Hua’s Friendship Scroll (now at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford), which Ling first sent to England with poet Xu Zhimo in 1925. In fact, the scroll travelled well beyond Bloomsbury for the next 35 years, gaining inscriptions, paintings, and poetry in England, France, China, and Japan. Stalla is piecing together its journey as a way to think through global modernism and its contexts, and to both research and imagine the second half of Ling’s life outside of China as an artist, writer, teacher, and self-described global nomad.