People
Stefan Huebner (Hübner) is a Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute. He is also a historian whose work centres on modern Japan and its connections to other parts of Asia and the West. He has a PhD in History with special distinction (best degree) from Jacobs University Bremen, Germany. During the spring semester 2019, he served as a U.S. SSRC Transregional Research Fellow at Harvard University, where he has previously been a Fulbright scholar during the spring semester 2018. During the spring semester 2017, he was a visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies. Earlier, he was a History and Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a postdoctoral and a doctoral fellow at the German Historical Institute Washington, DC, and a doctoral fellow at the German Institute for Japanese Studies Tokyo.
His current research project is a global history of the industrialisation and urbanisation of the world ocean during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He is writing a monograph in which he argues that since the Age of Coal, Earth has been experiencing an amphibious transformation. Through novel forms of the built environment, this transformation has turned many sea surfaces, particularly those of East Asian waters, into a new part of the amphibious human habitat.
His most recent articles on ocean industrialisation and urbanisation were published in Journal of Global History, Modern Asian Studies, and Environmental History. He also edited a volume on “Oceanic Japan” featuring two chapters written by him (on the periodisation of Japan’s oceanic history and on Japan’s platform archipelago) and 20 more contributed by leading experts on oceanic history, which will be published by University of Hawai’i Press in 2024. News articles were released in AsiaGlobal Online, ChannelNews Asia, AsiaGlobal Online, and Yale Global.
He is interested in digital humanities methodology and Co-PI of the Singapore Social Science Research Council (SSRTG Type A) project on “Linking the Digital Humanities to Biodiversity History in Singapore and Southeast Asia.”
He and his collaborators also created the Singapore Ecological History Map, which includes about 60 GIS layers (based on historical maps) that illustrate the history of land-use change, rainfall and extreme weather events, and malaria incidence in Singapore. It also features three related thematic storymaps.
His first book—Pan-Asian Sports and the Emergence of Modern Asia, 1913-1974—was published in 2016 and a Japanese translation was released in 2017.