Prof Kenneth Dean, the Raffles Professor for Humanities in the Department of Chinese Studies, NUS as well as the Research Cluster Leader for Religion and Globalisation in the Asia Research Institute, NUS, was awarded the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Professorship at Yale-NUS in July 2022.

Prof Dean shared that he was deeply honored to receive the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Professorship. The Professorship is supported by the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple which is dedicated to the Chinese Goddess of Mercy and well-known for its philanthropy. Prof Dean is the third professor to be awarded the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Professorship after Prof Jay L. Garfield (currently Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Buddhist Studies at Smith College), and Prof Bryan W. Van Norden (currently James Monroe Taylor Chair in Philosophy at Vassar College, and Chair Professor in Philosophy at Wuhan University).

“Since my field of research is Chinese religion, I am especially delighted to hold this chaired professorship. I have very deep respect for the sustained and substantial philanthropy of this great Singaporean Buddhist temple in the areas of health care, social services, and education,” Prof Dean said.

Prof Dean hopes that this new position will enable him to introduce more students at Yale-NUS, NUS, and across Singapore to the incredible richness and diversity of Chinese ritual life in Singapore. “In my previous research, I mapped out the locations of over 800 Chinese temples in Singapore on my Singapore Historical GIS website. This was a digital archival project which also studied how Singapore was built from the ground up by cultural and religious institutions. By conserving history, the past will not disappear so easily,” he said.

During this professorship, Prof Dean is hoping to complete two follow-up volumes to Chinese Epigraphy of Singapore: 1819-1911, with one focused on temples and regional, clan, and trade associations with dated inscriptions from 1911-2022, and a second on the United or Joint Temples of Singapore.

Prof Dean explained, “There are over 360 temples which are gathered into 68 such United Temples in Singapore. They are full of unique cultural life with temple leaders, spirit mediums, and members who have memories related to the ritual communities and long-lost village life of Singapore. With support from the professorship, I would like to conserve oral histories from these individuals while involving Yale-NUS students in the crucial process of archiving Singapore’s history.”

This article first appeared in Yale-NUS Stories on 26 July 2022.