By /

Matthias Wong

Matthias Wong_002 - Halfbody

Profile: https://discovery.nus.edu.sg/6890-matthias-wong

I am a cultural historian of early modern Europe, with a focus on the lived experiences of seventeenth-century Britain, temporality, and reactions to trauma in print culture. I also work in the fields of public history, digital humanities, and environmental research. Prior to joining the Department, I was a digital humanities postdoctoral researcher at the Treatied Spaces Research Group at the University of Hull.

My current book manuscript examines the execution of England’s King Charles I in 1649 as a moment of ideational change and adaptation. I examine the popular print publications of three groups of writers, namely, astrologers, history writers, and newsbook authors, to describe how they saw the future and to track how these visions shifted when faced with an unexpected and violent regicide. I demonstrate that the early moderns tried to normalise the disruptive regicide by situating it within broader narratives of time, elongating their time horizons to more cosmic scales. I show how these writers downplayed the radical nature of the event in search of order: they incorporated the regicide within grand narratives of God’s providential plans on earth, of generational changes in society and politics, and of recurring cycles of rebellious behaviour stretching back to the distant past.

My work in the digital humanities explores the use of GIS, visualisation and computer vision to recover Indigenous American presence and their cultural geography from historical documents. As part of the Brightening the Covenant Chain project, I processed maps of colonial America from the British Library to create the first dataset of the Indigenous Northeast for a new ‘Kinetic Map’ visualisation. Designed and created with colleagues at Treatied Spaces and King’s Digital Lab (KCL), this Map will visualise the topography of Indigenous American presence, supporting and reflecting our current historical understanding that Indigenous peoples and colonial settlers shared common worlds in the American Northeast. This project is funded by an UK AHRC Standard Research Grant (AH/T006099/1). I collaborated with The Alan Turing Institute to explore the use of high-performance computing and computer vision to trace the impact of Indigenous cartographic contributions in pre-modern maps. This was funded by an Alan Turing Post-Doctoral Enhancement Award.

As a public historian, I am the co-lead on a university consortium project to incorporate societal and cultural impacts into the evaluation of UK outer space activities, for which I was awarded the University of Hull’s Best Knowledge Exchange Postdoc Prize in 2022. This work was funded by the UK Space Agency (OW131743BZ14S). I work with museum partners including the American Museum & Gardens and the North American Native Museum to enhance the interpretation and contextualization of Indigenous materials in their collections, and to explore digitally connecting Indigenous communities to these materials. I also helped reformulate history curriculum in UK schools with Pearson Edexcel and AQA Exam Boards, and I have co-authored evidence for and provided research expertise to the UK Parliament.

I am currently Associate Editor of Elements in Indigenous Environmental Research (Cambridge University Press). I am an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Higher Education Academy. I am a Member of the AHRC Peer Review College, Historical Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society, Society for Renaissance Studies, Folklore Society, UKRI Early Career Researcher Forum.

EDUCATION:

  • PhD in History, University of Cambridge
  • MSc in International Relations, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University
  • Joint BA/PhB (Hons, First Class) in History, National University of Singapore and the Australian National University

RESEARCH AREAS:

  • Early modern culture, memory and temporality
  • Digital humanities (museums, computer vision, digital Indigeneity)
  • Indigenous environmental research
  • Outer space and liminal environments

TEACHING AREAS:

  • European history
  • Public and applied history
  • Digital humanities

PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS: