Global Indo-Pacific Global Mobility Fellowship
List of Fellows
| Name | Affiliation & Institution | Fellowship Location | Fellowship Period | Project Idea |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chen Xiaoling Profile |
Postdoctoral Fellow, Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore | Japan | September – October 2026 | Chen Xiaoling's current book project, Zero-COVID: Infrastructure and State Power in Contemporary China, examines the reconfiguration of economic, political, public security, public services, and grassroots organizations in China’s COVID-19 containment. At ARI, Xiaoling studies China’s extraterritorial governance and the post-COVID lived experiences of Chinese living abroad (e.g., Singapore, Japan), addressing the intersection of Global China, infrastructure, and civil society. |
| Julian zur Lage Profile |
Postdoctoral Fellow, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany | Germany | September 2026 | Julian zur Lage is a global historian with an interest in the circulation of people, goods and knowledge. He is currently conducting a postdoctoral research project at the Technische Universität Braunschweig with the working title The Migration of the “Others”: German Shipping, (Coerced) Migration and Labor in the 19th Century Indo-Pacific. For his Global Indo-Pacific Mobility Fellowship at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore in September 2026, Julian plans to investigate concepts of the Indo-Pacific avant la lettre in the 19th century and will conduct archival research on shipping and migration. |
| Thomas Kaal Profile |
Researcher, German Historical Institute London | Singapore | 20 April – 19 May 2026 | Thomas Kaal's work focuses on late medieval religious cultures, with a particular interest in ritual music and soundscapes. As part of the fellowship, he will explore the importance of the Indo-Pacific region for the study of religious sound in non-modern contexts, ranging from (medieval) European imaginaries of religious practices in Asia to modern scholarly approaches to sound and knowing, including the influential concept of “acoustemology”. |
| Phill Wilcox Profile |
Research Associate, Bielefeld University | Singapore | August 2026 | Global China, development and infrastructure, particularly in and around Southeast Asia. |
| Mallika Leuzinger Profile |
Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin | Singapore | June – August 2026 | Mallika's project Photographs and the Making of History: Case Studies from Singapore explores the work of photographs in producing—and puncturing—the historical imagination by ethnographically surveying a range of heritage initiatives in the city. Their broader project is about the transformation of history as a practice and concept in South Asia over the past decade, and focuses on the rise of “citizen archives”, “picture libraries” and “memory projects”, which position themselves against state—and certainly institutional—archives. |
| Dalu Zhong Profile |
PhD Candidate, Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University, Germany | Singapore | June–Aug 2026 |
Dalu Zhong's project examines the global entanglements and intellectual history of the Sino-Burma borderlands during the Second World War. Their broader research interests include Sinophone literature, memory and heritage studies, and historical anthropology in the early twentieth century. |
| Tanya Talwar Profile |
Postdoctoral Researcher, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | Singapore | August – October 2026 | Tanya's research examines developments in art education in colonial South Asia from transregional and transcultural perspectives. Her work extends from her doctoral thesis, which focused on the Schools of Industrial Arts in Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, and Lahore and their entanglements with aesthetic pedagogy and artistic/artisanal forms of making. |
| Zezhou Yang Profile |
Postdoctoral Fellow, Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore | London | June 2026 | Zezhou's project examines how modern Chinese intellectuals attempted to decolonise geography-based knowledge of the Nepali Himalayas in the early and mid-twentieth century, in order to critically reflect on contemporary debates surrounding the decolonisation of knowledge production in China and its implications for the Global South. |
| Arnab Dutta Profile |
Lecturer, University of Groningen, The Netherlands | DIJ Tokyo | July 2026 | Titled The Indo-Pacific Knowledge in Indian Anticolonialism: Emergent Geopolitical Imaginaries from Pan-Asianism to the Pacific Affairs, 1920s–40s, Arnab’s research reconstructs the emergence of the Indo-Pacific as a geopolitical concept within Indian anticolonial thought and situates Indian engagements with the Pacific within a wider transnational history of spatial imagination and political geography. |
