Making STS Singaporean

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Acknowledgments

I particularly thank my colleague Connor Graham for reading and commenting on a first draft of this article and adding his significant memory of STS in Singapore to my own.

Notes

¹ Zaheer, along with other mostly Indian and Indian-Singaporean scholars at NUS, such as K. P. Mohanan and Arun Bala, was then part of an informal lunch group called the Serangoon Circle. Highly literate and intellectually engaged, this group of cross-disciplinary scholars were among the first to discuss STS-related themes in Singapore.

² Select papers from this conference were published as Chan, Clancey, and Chieh 2002.

³ Other conferences in Singapore in those early years would bring such prominent STS scholars as Hashimoto Takehiko, Nakajima Hideto, Sungook Hong, and Daiwie Fu into our extended (overseas) community.

⁴ Among prominent scholars at NTU who have worked closely with us at NUS in forging an island-wide STS community are Sulfikar Amir, Lisa Onaga, Hallam Stevens, and Fang Xiaoping.

⁵ Our Asian Biopoleis project resulted in three large conferences, a number of smaller workshops, and over two dozen publications. See Coopmans et al. 2012; Clancey and Chen 2013; and Clancey et al. 2013.

⁶ Connor and Margaret would go on to become founding directors of Tembusu College.

⁷ For a fuller discussion of the founding and rationale of Tembusu College, see Clancey 2017.

⁸ Many members of the current fellowship were recruited directly from our Asian Biopoleis grant project, which illustrates how a research project can creatively be used to seed undergraduate education. These include Tembusu College directors Catelijne Coopmans, Connor Graham, and Margaret Tan and fellows Sorelle Henricus, Shamraz Anver, and Liz P. Y. Chee, as well as associate fellows John Phillips and Axel Gelfert.

⁹ The college structure has also allowed us to bridge the “two cultures” divide by recruiting faculty from STEM departments to help teach STS-themed modules, including the mathematician Tay Yong Chiang, the medical researchers Lina Lim and Prakash Hande, and the engineer Kuan Yee Han. The prominent historian of science John van Wyhe presents a unique case, having a joint appointment at Tembusu and the Department of Biological Sciences as well as an associate fellowship at ARI.

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Notes on contributors

Gregory Clancey

Gregory Clancey is associate professor in the Department of History, leader of the STS Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, and master of Tembusu College, all at the National University of Singapore. Clancey received his PhD in the historical and social study of science and technology from MIT. He has been a Fulbright Graduate Scholar at the University of Tokyo and a Lars Hierta Scholar at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. His book Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity (2006) won the Sidney Edelstein Prize in 2007.