Jill J. Tan

Jill J. Tan is a writer, artist, and researcher committed to collaborative practice and multimodal
exploration through games, performance and poetics. As a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at
Yale University, Jill studies the contemporary management of death in Singapore, working with
funeral professions and public-facing death literacy efforts. As part of her dissertation project,
Jill has developed a series of participatory embodied workshops on sedimented histories of death
in Singapore. She was awarded Yale’s Theron Rockwell Field Prize in 2022, given for one
dissertation or work of scholarship or creative writing across disciplines. At Yale, she has been a
teaching fellow for classes on contemporary Southeast Asia and introductory sociocultural
anthropology, as well as taught a self-designed course on Writing Creative Ethnographies.

Jill’s research is supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation; a Social Science Research Council
Graduate Research Fellowship; National University of Singapore Development Grants; the Tan
Kah Kee Foundation and Tan Ean Kiam Foundation; and the Council on Southeast Asian
Studies, MacMillan Center, the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational
Migration, and the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. Jill has developed work at
the intersections of art and anthropology through residencies at Dance Nucleus, co-convened the
independent multidisciplinary conference Listening Academy in Singapore: Loss Attunement in
2023, and in 2022 co-created a performance workshop exploring care infrastructures with artist
Alecia Neo for The Esplanade, Singapore’s national performing arts center. Since 2021, she has
been a section editor for the Society for Cultural Anthropology Fieldsight’s Visual and New
Media Review.

Selected Publications (Peer reviewed — *)

*Tan, Jill J. In press. “Notes on the bicentennial of a f/l/ound/er/ing (2019).” In Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Singapore. Eds. Cheryl Naruse, Joanne Leow, and Faris Joraimi. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

*Tan, Jill J. “Arts Approaches to Death in Singapore: Considering Universality, Cultural Mediation, and Everyday Immersion.” In Death and the Afterlife: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from a Global City, edited by Kit Ying Lye and Terence Heng, 1st ed. London: Routledge, 2024. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003344858.

*Tan, Jill J.,“Embodied Futurities: Alecia Neo’s Socially Engaged Art Practice with Caregivers in Singapore.” In “Special Issue Forms of Encounter & Exchange: artist-led approaches to Public Pedagogy in the Asia Pacific Region,” Issue 7,  Journal of Public Pedagogies. (August 2023). https://doi.org/10.15209/jpp.1288.

Zhou, Grace H., and Jill J. Tan. 2023. “Un/tracing Empire: Pollinations between the Poetic and Ethnographic.” Visual and New Media Review, Fieldsights, April 20. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/un-tracing-empire-pollinations-between-the-poetic-and-ethnographic 

Koh, Vanessa, Al Lim, and Jill J. Tan. “The Singaporean State and Community Care in the Time of Corona.” City & Society 32, no. 2 (August 1, 2020). https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.12297.

*Tan, Jill J. “Circulating Pluralized Selfhood: Testimony and Witnessing in Protest Pamphlets as Emergent Narrative Genre.” In Bhoil, Shelly, ed. 2020. Resistant Hybridities: New Narratives of Exile Tibet. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books.