I am a historian of Chinese societies in Southeast Asia, with a special interest in how racial, gender and sexuality structures in the region have been shaped through the forces of Eurasian imperialism, nationalisms and global capitalism. Born and raised in Singapore, I have been trained in History at the University of Cambridge (BA), National University of Singapore (MA), and the University of Chicago (PhD). My first book, Strangers in the Family: Gender, Patriliny and the Chinese in Colonial Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2023), is a gendered history of settler Chinese community formation in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period (1816–1942). I also maintain an interest in debates in world history, historiography and social, gender and postcolonial theory.

I am currently involved in three projects. First, I am working on a second monograph tentatively titled, “A Diaspora of Shopkeepers: Empire, Race and Chinese Commercial Expansion in Southeast Asia (1870-1970s)”. With a focus on Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, this project is both a bottom-up history of the ethnic Chinese wholesale and retail trade, and a history of the racializing processes of economic knowledge formation. Second, I am writing a socio-cultural history of early Chinese television in Singapore for the Popular Culture in Nanyang Conference (to be held in November 2023). Third, I have also been invited to contribute a chapter on Chinese migration and entrepreneurship in Southeast Asia for the early modern volume in the Cambridge History of Southeast Asia (forthcoming, 2025).