Graduate Teaching Assistantship

Ho Chi Tim was admitted into the History-PhD programme at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa (UHM), starting August 2009. He was awarded a graduate teaching assistantship, which includes an annual stipend of US$15,552 for the first year and a tuition waiver, and will assist in teaching the pioneering World History courses offered by the Department of History at UHM. The award is renewable for an additional two years. Chi Tim has proposed to research a history of social welfare in colonial Singapore and in the process, hopes to cover several fields of research including social, economic and developmental theories, social histories, and colonialism and post-colonialism in modern Southeast Asia.

Chi Tim earned a BA (Hons) (1999-2003) and a MA (2006-2009) from the Department of History at NUS. He worked as a policy officer in the Singapore Civil Service. His MA thesis on “A Situated History of the Journal of Southeast Asian History / Studies” was completed under the supervision of Assistant Professor Maitrii Aung-Thwin. He is also the co-founder and editor of the web-journal Citizen Historian (http://citizenhistorian.com/), a graduate students’ initiative to promote discussion and sharing of ideas about all things concerning history.

 Minami Orihara recently received her MA degree in History, and will join the Asian Studies Programme at the University of British Columbia in Canada, beginning in September 2009. She will be working on Japanese Buddhism and politics during prewar and wartime periods under Professor Nam-lin Hur. She has been awarded full financial support for up to four years.

Her MA thesis focused on Japanese millenarian thought in the 1930s and she has co-authored a paper with Assoc Prof Gregory Clancey on Japanese religion and nature, to be published in a volume edited by Professor Prasenjit Duara.