People

Stefan Huebner (Hübner) is Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute. He is also the President of the Society of Floating Solutions (Singapore) / SFSS and the Vice-Chair of the International Scientific Committee for the annual World Conference on Floating Solutions. His current research project covers the past and present industrialization and urbanization of the world ocean since the mid-twentieth century. In his forthcoming monograph on Earth’s Amphibious Transformation (Cambridge University Press, 2026), he argues that the extension of the human habitat onto aquatic surfaces using floating and seabed-fixed structures has granted access to multiple new vertical spatial layers, which resulted in numerous important forms of socioeconomic development and environmental degradation. These layers include the oil and gas deposit below the seabed, farmed marine biomass concentrated in the water column, floating buildings on the surface resilient to sea level rise and other water level changes, the wind and solar energy harvestable through turbines and PV systems near and above the surface, and outer space reached from offshore rocket launch and landing sites.

Interested in historical developments and public policy issues, 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 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 most recent articles on ocean industrialization and urbanization were published in Ocean and Coastal Management, 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 periodization of Japan’s oceanic history and on Japan’s platform archipelago) and 20 more contributed by leading experts on oceanic topics. Recent news articles were released in ChannelNews Asia, Nature, AsiaGlobal Online, ChannelNews Asia, and AsiaGlobal Online.

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.