I will be in Singapore from 12-18 January, giving a number of talks at junior colleges, and culminating with a conference with my UK colleagues at the ‘Imagining Asia Symposium‘ at Nanyang Technological University (more about that later). Last year’s lecture tour of Singapore was extremely enjoyable and I’m looking forward to revisiting old friends, making new ones, and interacting with what are unfailingly motivated and academically high-achieving groups of students to talk about northeast Asia.
The institutions I’ll be visiting are as follows; specific dates will be posted subsequently:
– Victoria Junior College (beautiful campus in the southeastern coast of the island, close to East Coast Park);
– Hwa Chong Institution (‘the best of East and West,’ last year I spoke here about the Chinese intervention in the Korean War, thanks to a clever Manchester connection);
– Tanglin Trust (‘British-based learning with an international perspective’; very focused students preparing for university; last year I lectured here about the Korean War);
– United World College of Southeast Asia (founded in by Lee Kuan Yew and reflecting the principles of Kurt Hahn; this will be my first visit);
– Anglo-Chinese Junior College (super-energetic students, Methodist tradition; last year I spoke here on Sino-Japanese conflict).
Another positive aspect of spending time in Singapore is its hothouse atmosphere for research and publication. In the last two-dozen months, I’ve learned a great deal from scholars working at National University of Singapore (like Kirsten Sellars and Masuda Hajimu), materials held in the Wang Gungwu Library at NTU, reading work by policy scholars at the RSIS (Michael Raska & Euan Graham, Sinologists who also work on North Korea).
Adam Cathcart 