Introducing: Sandra Manickam
Sandra Manickam recently joined the Institute for History as a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC Starting Grant project ' COMET. Human Subject Research and Medical Ethics in Colonial Southeast Asia', under the supervision of Fenneke Sysling. Below, she introduces herself.
I grew up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I did my undergraduate studies at the University of Southern California where I was fortunate enough to have as my teacher the historian of gender and empire, Philippa Levine. I distinctly remember asking her what it took to get a PhD, and she pointed to a large hard-bound book on top of a dusty shelf, and said, “that's what you have to write.” “But don't worry,” she said, “you get several years to write it.” I worked as a market researcher for a few years but left the US to return to Southeast Asia to do a master's at the National University of Singapore. For my master's, I was busy unpacking the idea of nation and Malayness on the Malay peninsula. However, I realized that my abiding interest was in race: what it was and is, how people thought about it, how people lived through and despite it, and all its different underpinnings and complications. I explored race in relation to the history of anthropology of colonial British Malaya at the Australian National University, Canberra, where I discovered that Australians too have interesting ways of thinking about race which became the subject of many discussions with my supervisors.
My first 'real' academic job was as a Junior Professor (W1) of Southeast Asian Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. I didn't realize that there were two Frankfurts before taking the job, and I am glad to say that I think I got the better Frankfurt. I still have fond feelings when thinking of FFM and I try to go back regularly. I then went back to Singapore to take up an assistant professor job, this time at Nanyang Technological University. Around this time, I also started working more seriously on the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia and the immediate post-war period of Malaya. For the last ten years, I have made Utrecht my home, and I've been assistant professor of history at Erasmus University of Rotterdam since 2017.
Growing older in different countries is an interesting experience, and in the last few years, my mind has turned to different ways of experiencing medicine and health, and how that intersects with racial and ethnic identities. This common interest has brought me to Fenneke's research project where I work on the history of medicine in Malaya between British and Japanese empires; genetic research on Indigenous peoples; and the visual legacies of photography. I'm glad to have time to read and write, to explore the library and indulge my interest in publications in Jawi — Malay in Arabic script. I hope to meet many of you during my time here.