Peter Tan’s Home Page

 

Peter K W Tan,

Department of English Language and Literature,

National University of Singapore,

Block AS5, 7 Arts Link,

SINGAPORE 117570

Email: PeterTan(at)nus.edu.sg [replace (a) with @]

Office: Room 604, AS5

Telephone: +65 6516 6038

Facsimile: +65 6773 2981

University position

I am a senior lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore.

Research

My research interests are in the following areas:

What I try to do is to combine these research interests in some meaningful way. The language situation in Singapore is an exciting one for a linguist because of the multilingual situation it is in, and partly because it is still in a state of flux. Also emerging is a range of different kinds of writing in English which need to negotiate issues of identity, perspective and social class through the medium used.

Please click here for some of my publications.

Teaching

My teaching in the Department has been in these modules:

Short biography

I grew up in Kuala Lumpur, and after my Higher School Certificate (equivalent to GCE A levels) in St John's Institution went on to read English at the University of Malaya. They gave me a first class honours BA degree for that in 1985.

Kuala Lumpur was an exciting place in spite of all its detractors, and this is true linguistically as well. It began as a Cantonese Chinese mining town in the 19th century. It has since become more cosmopolitan but Malay, English and Cantonese jostle with each other; other languages like Mandarin, Tamil and Punjabi also make their presence felt.

I went on to do my postgraduate degree at the Department of Applied Linguistics, University of Edinburgh. I worked under Elizabeth Black and my thesis was on the stylistics of drama. The analysis was focused on Tom Stoppard's almost manic but absolutely hilarious play Travesties. They gave me a PhD for the thesis in the summer of 1989.

I had a fascinating time in Edinburgh and made some enduring friends over there. Contrary to what people say, Edinburgh is not especially cold and there are not many days when there is snow cover on the ground in the city. Edinburgh, and Scotland in general, is also exciting linguistically. Most lowland Scots do not speak Gaelic but but there is a range of English dialects spoken (I consider what is called Scots a dialect of English), some converging more towards the standard variety south of the border (ie England!), some less.

I joined the National University of Singapore in 1989 and have been here ever since.

I am married to Lee Gek Ling who works in the Centre for English Language Communication in the same university. We have three children: Christopher John (born November 93), Marion Grace (born December 97) and Philip Mark (born February 99). If anyone is interested in a (non-recent) family photograph, please click here.

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