Dr Tim Harper

Dr Harper has supervised MPhil and PhD theses on a range of topics on modern Southeast Asian history, the region’s connections with the wider world and other areas of imperial history, particularly concerning the Middle East.

Examples of Ph.D. theses on Southeast Asia are: European travel and knowledge in early modern Southeast Asia; nature, Islam and colonial rule in Trengganu; globalization and religious revival in the Indian Ocean Rim in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries; United States relations with Singapore in the 1950s; modernity, popular culture and urban life in colonial Singapore; revolution, communism, and history in the thought of Tran Van Giàu; civilian internees in Southeast Asia, 1941-45; language and politics in Malaysia, and transnational family formation in Southeast Asia. Other PhD projects supervised include opium consumption in Qing China; the political economy of the rubber trade in the British Empire; cosmopolitanism and port city elites in Asia; the British empire and the Hajj; British development policy during the Palestine mandate; early photography in colonial Asia; diaspora politics in Cairo during and after the First World War, and British military occupations of Eastern Mediterranean cities.