The NUS Museum is launching a new cycle of fellowship programmes, the NUS Museum Student Research Fellowship as well as the Alice & Agnes Tan Student Research Fellowship, to provide opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students at the National University of Singapore (NUS) to pursue research with a focus on engaging with the collections at the Museum and NUS Baba House. The two fellowships offer access to the resources housed within the NUS Museum and Baba House as well as opportunities to actively engage with the museum environment and our related programmes.

• Students who will be in the third or fourth year of undergraduate studies or pursuing graduate studies in NUS for Academic Year 2025/2026.
• Honours (Distinction) and above (4.0 GPA) in academic performance.
• Interested applicants are expected to have an Academic Supervisor who has agreed to supervise the project to be considered for the fellowship. The role of Academic Supervisors will be to guide the research of the fellow, ensure academic integrity of the research and provide feedback on the fellow’s performance.

• The NUS Museum Student Research Fellowship is open to students interested to embark on research focused on NUS Museum’s collections, exhibition histories and/or archives.
• The Alice & Agnes Tan Student Research Fellowship is open to students interested to embark on research focused on the NUS Baba House as an object of study, as well as the NUS Museum’s Straits Chinese Collection.
• A few resources which potential applicants may wish to consult to ideate research topics from include:
  – NUS Museum’s Prospectus, focusing on selected collections of artefacts
  – The upcoming Prospectus for AY2526 categories, including Southeast Asian Textiles, Southeast Asian Ceramics, Fistful of Colours: Moments of Chinese Cosmopolitanism, “Malayanization” of Chinese Ink, and Contemporary Exploration of Heritage
  – NUS Museum’s Collections Online, a searchable online database of NUS Museum’s collections

• Fellows will be offered a stipend of $4000, disbursed in four parts after each of the following milestones through the entire duration of the fellowship:
  – Acceptance of the fellowship
  – Submission of the finalised workplan
  – Midpoint Check-In
  – Final submission of research findings

• Fellows will be assigned a Museum Advisor from NUS Museum to assist the student fellows with relevant content knowledge and accessing the Museum’s resources. The role of the Museum Advisors will be as follows:
  – To offer expertise on the Museum’s collections, exhibitions and archives
  – To guide research design
  – To assist with research methods
  – To advise on ethics and intellectual property

• Fellows are highly encouraged to participate in activities and programmes organised in conjunction with the Museum’s summer programme for interns (More details to follow upon acceptance of the fellowship position).
• Fellows will be given access to collections and archives of the Museum or Baba House on for the duration of research fellowship.
• Fellows will be granted access to space for research at the NUS Museum’s Resource Library, which houses materials pertaining to the Museum’s collections, collecting interests and how these have developed.
• Fellows will have the opportunity to materialise the results of their research into various outputs including but not limited to:
  – Research Papers
  – Public talks and presentations
  – Exhibitionary formats of display and prep-room
  – Creative responses

The evaluation criteria for both NUS Museum’s and Alice & Agnes Tan’s Student Research Fellowship are as follows:

Methodology

• Clear definition and articulation of the proposed project’s objectives
• Robustness and strength of the methodology
• Clarity in describing and explaining the methodology
• Employment of interdisciplinary approaches and methodologies
• Alignment with fellowship’s objectives

Content

• Originality of the proposed research project
• Relevance to and use of NUS Museum’s collections and exhibitions
• For Alice & Agnes Tan Student Research Fellowship, responses to research themes as outlined above (see Research Areas and Priority Research Themes)

Other Considerations

• Proposals that orientate towards an Honours/Master’s Thesis or an ongoing research project under the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (UROP) will be favourably considered
• Proposals that employ object-based analysis, research using archival materials will be favourably considered
• Proposals that consider creative and exhibitionary outputs will be favourably considered
• Any other considerations not included in the above-mentioned criteria (e.g. synergies with NUS Museum’s outreach programmes, potential for continued collaboration, etc.)

• Fellows must be able to commit to the term of research from May 2025 to April 2026.
• Fellows must propose suitable deliverables associated with their projects that must include a minimum of a research paper and accompanying documentation of the research project.
• Upon notification of their award, fellows will work on and submit a workplan to be drawn up in consultation with the assigned Museum Advisor. Stipends will be arranged according to this schedule.
• Fellows will be asked to present their research progress at the midpoint of the term of fellowship.
• Fellows will be asked to share their research during the Museum Research Week event organised by NUS Museum.
• Fellows will be asked to give a full presentation of the research work at the end of the fellowship in AY25/26 Sem 2.

• Apply by filling up the form in this link.
• Successful applicants must provide an email confirmation from an academic supervisor once accepted.

Please prepare the following documents for your application:

• Proposal for Research Project (see below for requirements)
• NUS Unofficial Transcript (for Honours students)
• Academic Transcript (for Graduate students)
• A Writing Sample of 2,000 – 3,000 words in length (e.g. previously submitted essays or academic articles)

In your Proposal for Research Project, please include the following details:

• Choice of Fellowship you are applying for (i.e. NUS Museum Student Research Fellowship or Alice & Agnes Tan Student Research Fellowship)
• Abstract of your Research Proposal (250 – 300 words) that addresses specific research topic, objectives, backgrounds, purposes, significance
• Research Questions
• Relevant collections and exhibitions at NUS Museum or Baba House that the research project will engage with
• Proposed methodology
• Timeline of your research project that describes key stages of your research (e.g. desk-top research, fieldwork, final submission)
• A preliminary bibliography and/or literature review

Proposals should be sufficiently self-contained for an assessment without further reference to other materials

Kazuto Nakano	I am a student at Yale-National University of Singapore College, specializing in anthropology of climate change, multispecies ethnography, materiality and care studies, and heritage work. My extensive experience as a research assistant for historians and political economists in East and Southeast Asia supports an interdisciplinary approach to these fields. Outside of my studies, I love making tea for my friends and reading Japanese novels, blending cultural appreciation with personal enjoyment. Boats are indicators of movement, journeying across oceans with humans, fish, and trade goods. They also appear in museums as models, telling stories of life around water. This research focuses on boats to investigate life in maritime Southeast Asia through ethnography and museum research. Ethnographic studies are conducted in coastal communities on Bantayan Island in the Philippines, engaging with fisherfolk to understand social-material relations. Additionally, the social history of the Nusantara Boats collection at the NUS Museum is examined, featuring models crafted by boat-makers in the region. The research aims to show that boats, both in their physical form and as models, exercise agency in coastal lives and museums. It highlights the migration of boats and peoples and the resulting changes in coastal environments, beliefs, and practices. The final products will include a capstone paper and an exhibition, exploring the socio-material relations between humans and non-humans amid growing environmental precarity.
Ryan-Ashleigh Boey	Ryan-Ashleigh Boey is a fourth-year English major. His current research interests lie in cultural memory studies, children’s literature, and (fictional inscriptions of) the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. “Breaking and Remaking” approaches the exhibitionary potential of the NUS Museum’s Charles Dyce Collection through the lens of performance studies. It attempts an exposition of the Collection’s colonialist articles as text and the exhibition of said articles as performance in order to tease out the different (mutually constitutive and inflective) modalities of meaning-making afforded by exhibitionary practice. Specifically, it attends to the contention that colonialist art/efacts can be “br[oken] and rema[de]” in the hands of “trickster figures” (Conquergood 138) so as to vitiate, deconstruct, and, thereby, denaturalise the very epistemic latitudes within whose remit they had initially been conceived. In line with these parameters and with broader recourse to the critical lexicons of Homi Bhabha and Bertolt Brecht amongst others working betwixt and between the fields of performance and cultural studies, I ask under what circumstances Dyce’s oeuvre might productively rehearse the memory of colonialism in a distinctly postcolonial Singapore.
Gan Xin Chen	Xin Chen is a 3rd year student in the History and Political Science double degree programme. Her interests lie in the intersections of material culture, Asian history and international relations. She writes for MAJU as a policy explainer, and has other works featured in ‘Voices from Asians and Europeans on “The Future of Asia-Europe Cooperation”. Xin Chen is also a national shooter and enjoys reading and film photography for leisure. The Peranakan community is often associated with their extensive trade links between China and the Straits Settlements, as well as its amalgamation of Chinese, European, and local culture. As both utilitarian objects and artistic expressions, ceramics encapsulate the material manifestations of these influences. With the Straits Chinese Collection at the fore, much can be revealed about the economic ties between China and the Straits Settlements through further investigation of the histories behind the ceramics in the Alice and Peter Tan Collection. Hence, through the study of the Alice and Peter Tan Collection, a better understanding of the economic networks of the Peranakan community during the late 19th to early 20th century can be forged.

Back to top