Annual Reports

DIRECTOR’S FORWARD
Prof Anthony Reid

The year 2006 witnessed the celebration of the fifth anniversary of ARI. The Institute was established in July 2001 as an expansion of the previous Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS). Its first year was relatively low key but important, as the first appointments were made under the supervision of Prof Lily Kong as FASS Dean and Prof Alan Chan as Vice-Dean, smoothing the way for a Director to arrive a year later.

During the following three years ARI steadily expanded from its original home on the floor beneath the Dean’s office in FASS – the heritage of CAS. As that original space on the 4th floor of Building AS7 filled up, other temporary spaces were found in different corners of the Faculty – at the top of AS6, on the 6th floor of AS7, and in a long narrow room suitable only for a computer cluster at the bottom of AS6. Up through the end of 2006, therefore, ARI was operating in four different spaces, though all within the manageable confines of the FASS buildings. As noted in the previous report, we already knew that 2006 would be our last in that situation, prior to moving early in 2007 to refurbished premises in the Tower Block of the Bukit Timah campus – 10 km away from FASS and the contacts we had made there.

Other changes in the way ARI is funded and managed within the NUS have necessitated some alterations in the evolution anticipated in my 2005 Report. As the anticipated instrument of healthy interaction with the Faculties, shared joint appointments had some success, with outstanding Islamicist Dr Michael Feener commencing his tenure-track appointment between History, FASS and ARI during 2006. The second joint search with the Faculty was unsuccessful. The idea of “buying out” faculty from teaching in Departments to allow them to initiate or complete a particularly ambitious research agenda, has yet to gain approval from the University community, however, and the anticipated one-year Faculty Research Fellowship was not proceeded with…