Welcome to Issues Under Tissues :)

Hi! I am Lay Sion Ng. I teach American Literature at Sophia University, Japan. My research focuses on Ernest Hemingway's work through the lens of environmental humanities, especially ecocriticism, posthumanism, and material feminism. My broader interests include gender and sexuality studies, symbolic cannibalism, etc.

Outside formal scholarship, I write freely—experimenting with form, working through ideas, capturing daily insights. This site features my academic reflections, free writing, and selected student work, published to motivate and celebrate thoughtful writing. Please check them out during your coffee break!

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world  -Voltaire

Content 🍽️

Teaching 🌻

• Notes 📕

• Students' Work 💮

• Workshops 🌱

• Course Evaluations 💯

Writing 

• Gender & Sexuality ⚧

• Published Work & Conference Abstracts 🤓

• Research Notes 📚

Storytelling 💌

• Stream of Consciousness💡

• Book Reflections 📖

• Poems 🍀

• Storytelling 💬

Awards 🎯

Lay Sion NG, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of American Literature at Sophia University, Japan, where she specializes in environmental humanities and ecocritical approaches to twentieth-century American literature. She holds a Ph.D. from Osaka University's Graduate School of Language and Culture. Her research fundamentally reframes Ernest Hemingway's literary canon through feminist ecocritical and posthumanist lenses, challenging conventional masculinist interpretations and revealing previously underexamined ecological dimensions in canonical American fiction.

NG's monograph Hemingway, Ecology and Culture: Re-reading Hemingway in the Anthropocene was published by Bloomsbury Academic in October 2025 as part of the Environmental Cultures Series. This study employs a multidisciplinary framework—integrating material ecocriticism, eco-gothic theory, posthumanism, light/colour ecology, olfactory discourse, environmental history, and cultural ecology—to demonstrate how Hemingway's fiction functions as an "ecological force" that heightens awareness of nonhuman agency and interspecies relationships. The monograph challenges reductive interpretations of Hemingway as merely a hyper-masculine figure, offering instead nuanced readings of significant works, including The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, and The Garden of Eden, alongside key short fiction such as "Big Two-Hearted River" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro."

Her peer-reviewed scholarship has appeared in leading journals, including The Hemingway Review and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. Notable publications include articles examining ecological gothic elements in A Farewell to Arms, material feminist perspectives on Don DeLillo's Zero K, and the politics of cure in The Sun Also Rises. A chapter on olfactory trans-species imagination in Hemingway's works was collected in Hemingway and Posthumanism (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). A chapter entitled “Hemingway's 'Odor of Courage': Bullfighting's Olfactory Ecology and the Search for Authenticity in Death in the Afternoon” was published in Hemingway Studies in Japan (Florida State Open Publishing, 2026).