Ying-kit Chan

Formerly a research fellow at IIAS from 2019 to 2022, I remain immensely grateful for its friendship and peer support. The warmth of its team and the camaraderie of successive batches of visiting fellows have nurtured me as a scholar. In a quiet yet supportive environment, I was able to make signitifcant progress on multiple academic projects, including my monograph, journal articles, and, perhaps most importantly, an edited volume on Cold War urbanism. The volume is a contribution to the Asian Cities book series, an IIAS publication in partnership with Amsterdam University Press; it will be released in April 2025.

Thanks to IIAS, I was also able to participate in unique, truly innovative academic conferences. I attended in 2018 the "Africa-Asia: A New Axis of Knowledge," my very first conference in Tanzania. Interaction with fellow Asianists in Africa allowed me to gather new perspectives on Asian studies beyond dominant viewpoints from Europe, North America, and even Asia itself. The de-imperialization of knowledge is an enterprise shared between Asia and Africa, and the Africa-Asia conference was one of very few avenues where scholars of the Global South could mingle and learn from one another's research.

Not forgetting IIAS for all its help and kindness, I helped convene a selection committee for the ICAS Book Prize 2023 (Chinese Language Edition)—this is one of very few international awards that recognize scholarly excellence outside Anglophone academia. At ICAS 13: Crossways of Knowledge—An International Conference, which was held in Surabaya, I also helped organize a roundtable session with the IIAS team and local experts. The session, on ethnic Chinese communities in Surabaya, took place at Rumah Abu Han, a historic ancestral house of a prominent Peranakan family in the history of Surabaya. The fact that descendants of the Han clan kindly granted access, and that the session was conducted in such a symbolic site beyond the conventional setting of lecture halls and hotel ballrooms, made it truly memorable for our participants. This, and all other feats, are probably possible only with IIAS!

Ying-kit Chan is Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore. His latest book is The Cityscapes of Taipei, Hong Kong, and Singapore during the Cold War (Amsterdam University Press).