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Fellowships & Grants

Undergraduate Research Library Fellowship 

We offer competitive undergraduate research fellowship opportunities for students to pursue research with a Southeast Asia focus, involving source materials in our main and special collections. This opportunity is open to all NUS undergraduate students regardless of their disciplinary backgrounds. Dive into our resources or partner with us to acquire materials!

 

Congratulations, Fellows of 2024!

Congratulations to our 2nd batch of fellows for their outstanding project submissions. Their research projects are selected for their significance in addressing scholarly gaps in Southeast Asia, potential in utilising/contribution to NUS Libraries’ collections, project innovation, and feasibility.

Fellows2024 Eunice Chua

Chua Wan Qian Eunice

Eunice is a final-year undergraduate majoring in Global Studies, specialising in Global Health, Environment and Technology, and a minor in English Literature. Her interests lie in uncovering the interactions between the environment, politics and culture. For leisure, she enjoys meeting new people and delving deep into new literary works.

Fluid Boundaries: Navigating Singaporean Water Identity

This project aims to uncover the relationship between water and Singaporean identity. By understanding how Singaporeans' relationships with water manifest historically and contemporarily, the complex relationship between globalisation, environment and identity become clear. As the role and meaning of water is always changing in the Singapore environment due to globalisation and climate change, it is important to consider how a water narrative, a crucial facet of Singaporean identity, affects socio-cultural norms moving forward, as opposed to other identities. Ultimately, this project proposes that the understanding of water in Singapore and how it affects identity in Singapore cannot be separated from understandings of Globalisation. Through uncovering the relationships between identity, water and globalisation in the context of Singapore, the project sheds light on how vulnerable, malleable and ever-changing the Singaporean identity always is in relation to its environment, as well as how its multi-faceted complex nature is fundamentally constantly in tension.

Mentors

Kah Wei

Wong Kah Wei

Associate University Librarian and Head of Learning & Engagement
Gandhi

Gandhimathy Durairaj

Principal Librarian and Head of Collections
Fellows2024 Dakshayani Ravindran

Dakshayani Ravindran

Dakshayani is a 5th year student in the double degree programme with NUS Law and Yale-NUS. She has a deep interest in socio-legal research, specifically in studying the legal consciousness of marginalised communities. Taking an intersectional approach, she is interested in understanding the power and limitations of law for minority groups. For leisure, she writes plays and enjoys drinking coffee.

Understanding Legal Consciousness Amongst Sri Lankan Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore

Dakshayani’s project explores the legal consciousness of Sri Lanka migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in Singapore. It explores whether Sri Lankan MDWs are aware of their legal entitlements and whether they perceive themselves as rights holding subjects. It goes further to study how Sri Lankan MDWs respond to rights infringements – namely, whether they make use of formal legal mechanisms to enforce their rights, whether they opt for hidden modes of resistance or whether they lump their grievances. This project seeks to fill the gap in the existing literature by understanding if and how MDWs exercise their rights within a legal framework where power imbalances are rife. The purpose of this project is to understand how we may reform laws and enforcement mechanisms which empower MDWs to enforce their rights and hold employers accountable.

Mentor

Bissy

Bissy Ithack

Senior Librarian
(Research Librarian – Law)
Fellows2024 Jordan Yeo

Jordan Yeo

Jordan is a 3rd year student majoring in Architecture at the National University of Singapore. His interest in architecture lies in its ability to empower, uplift, and represent our society. By the same token, he is passionate about humanitarian/public-interest design and research.

The Built Language of Inequality: An Urban Case Study on Marine Parade

This research aims to address the following questions: How does the built environment facilitate and produce inequalities in Singapore? How does the built language of inequality, across diverse scales (micro to macro), function and interact with one another as agglomerative systems that transform the everyday experience of people with different socioeconomic backgrounds and influence their life outcomes? In a survey conducted by the Department of Statistics Singapore in 2021, the statistical findings hypothesised the possibility of an unequal distribution of opportunities, wealth, racial-religious groups, age groups, infrastructural amenities, and other forms of public good and rights across different geographies and neighborhoods in Singapore. These forms of inequalities are often produced and facilitated by architectural elements and their wider urbanity. This research seeks to investigate the built language of inequality using Marine Parade, one of the most unequal neighborhoods in Singapore, as a case study.

Mentor

Raudhah

Raudhah Thongkam

Principal Librarian
(Immersive Learning Librarian)
Fellows2024 Lance

Lance Wu

Lance Wu is a 4th year History major with a minor in Southeast Asian studies. His interests are in the histories of colonialism and perspectives of identity creation in Singapore and the Malay world. For leisure, he either escapes reality by reading fiction or learns new material on his guitar.

Who Says They are Lazy?: (Re)Contextualising ‘Lazy’ Malay Images in 19th Century Malaya Through the Lives of Frank Athelstane Swettenham and Isabella Lucy Bird.

Negative stereotypes can result in prejudice and, in extreme cases, inflict real hurt or harm through social and economic marginalisation. Lance aims to (re)contextualise historical images of ‘laziness’ and ‘indolence’ of the Malays within British colonial discourses. This diverges from existing studies that ‘lazy’ images emerged from an ‘ideology’ of colonial capitalism to justify colonial rule. His research proposes that ‘laziness’ in British colonial writings were more complex than one-dimensional moral and capitalistic subjugation for the colonial project’s material gains. Biographical contextualisation of Frank Swettenham’s and Isabella Bird’s colonial experiences suggests that heterogenous opinions of ‘laziness’ resulted from intersecting personal and professional motivations of colonial personalities. Deeper textual analyses demonstrates that Malays’ ‘laziness’ was a superficial and incomplete observation. In reality, 19th century Malays were not condemned by Swettenham and Bird as morally deficient due to their supposed ‘laziness’ but rather, they acted rationally within prevailing environmental and social realities.

Mentor

Diyana

Nur Diyana Binte Abdul Kader

Librarian
(Research Librarian – HASS)
Fellows2024 Maximilian

Maximilian Neo Jun Hao

Maximilian is a final-year Philosophy, Politics, and Economics major. He has a keen interest in politics in the region, and is especially interested in the role and future of ASEAN given the numerous challenges it faces today.

ASEAN and Human Rights: Fundamentally Irreconcilable or a Work-in-progress?

In its effort to re-legitimise itself in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis, ASEAN introduced a new series of expectations for itself: that it was a more unified, institutionalised, and effective regional body, with the willpower and capacity to not only promote, but enforce human rights. ASEAN thus far, however, has failed markedly to live up to these expectations. Instead, it now faces an existential threat to its credibility and legitimacy, as its inefficacy and fundamental inability to either protect or promote human rights is laid bare by its repeated mishandling of the Myanmar Crisis. By investigating ASEAN’s approach to human rights thus far and adopting a comparative approach with other regional organisations, this thesis seeks to unravel this new conundrum ASEAN finds itself in, and identify key measures that must be addressed before ASEAN can make substantial changes on this issue.

Mentor

Herman Felani Bin Md Yunos

Associate University Librarian and Head of Operations

Jadely Seetoh

Senior Librarian
Fellows2024 Liurong

Wang Liurong

Liurong is a final-year Sociology undergraduate with a minor in Translation. How do individuals position themselves in this massive society? She hopes to discover this through exploring identity, culture, (social) memory, religion, and language. Walking along the street, with her earphones on, she likes crafting a world of her own in her mind.

Between ‘Two Worlds’: the ‘Story’ of ‘Home’ at Bukit Brown Cemetery

Bukit Brown Cemetery, housing approximately 100,000 tombs dating from 1922 to 1973, is not just a land for the dead but also for the living. The cemetery encapsulates a rich material culture that unveils a less-explored facet of Singapore, often overshadowed or forgotten in the context of the city-state’s high level of modernisation. However, it received unexpected public attention when the government announced plans in 2011 for its complete clearance to facilitate urbanisation and future residential development. Individuals who often have little or no prior connections and only possess distant memories of the graves call for its preservation. Why do these people who are expected to forgo the past and embrace the modern-urban world have the interest to re-engage with such a deserted ‘dead’-space? This project seeks to explore the expression of a shared nostalgia addressing the social amnesia encountered by the community in negotiation of their personhood and identity.

Mentors

Gaetan

Gaetan Boisson

Principal Librarian (Digital Scholarship Manager)

Tan Li-Jen

Assistant Librarian

To Be a Fellow

All NUS undergraduate students who are pursuing/interested to pursue research projects with a Southeast Asia focus.

Undergraduate students who are working on research projects under UROP, honours thesis, final year projects, etc are also encouraged to apply.

  • Successful applicants will be offered a stipend of S$2,500 – $4,000 during the course of their project.
  • Fellows will be assigned a mentor from NUS Libraries who will provide guidance on source materials in our collections.
  • Fellows may request for access to a reading room/pod at NUS Libraries over the course of their fellowship. All bookings are non-transferable.
  • Fellows get to the opportunity to showcase their research and fellowship experience through our communication network.
  • Fellows should complete their project by 30 June 2024.
  • Upon notification of their award, fellows will work on and submit a workplan to indicate the schedule when they will be working on their projects. Stipends will be arranged according to this schedule.
  • Fellows may also request to acquire source materials that are not available in NUS Libraries’ collections. This should be identified and submitted together with the workplan to allow sufficient time for acquisitions.
  • As spaces are limited, fellows are expected to inform the library if they are unable to utilise their booking of the reading room/pod.
  • Fellows will be asked to share their experiences via questionnaires or interviews, and provide a reflection on the outcomes or impacts of the fellowship.
  • Fellows are expected to acknowledge NUS Libraries Undergraduate Research Fellowship in all publications and presentations associated with research conducted under the fellowship.

    Applications have closed. Please look out for updates on the next call.


     

      
    31 Dec 2023Applications deadline 
    15 Jan 2024All applicants will be notified of decisions
    19 Jan 2024Submission of workplan by Undergraduate Research Library Fellows
    26 Jan 2024Approval of workplan by NUS Libraries Undergraduate Research Library Fellowship Committee
    1 Feb 2024Start of fellowship
    30 June 2024 All projects to conclude by this point

     

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