Singapore: view from the beach at Tanjong Katong. Watercolour by J. E. Taylor, 1879. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Trust Library Image Collection, no. 31737i: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/db735b5
Assistant Professor Fiona Williamson is currently working on a Ministry of Education-funded Tier 2 project, “Heat in Urban Asia: Past, Present and Future”, in collaboration with scholars at SMU, NUS, the UK, India, and Hong Kong. The multi-disciplinary project looks at numerous aspects of urban heat, from extreme heat, to its historical management and to urban temperature change over long periods. It considers, among others, how tropical heat intersected with culture, perhaps expressed through choices of food or fashion or how technological or architectural change interconnect with urban climates.
Dr. Williamson was also interviewed about heat in historical Singapore by the German radio station WDR5. You can read one of her contributions to Historicalclimatology.com on 19th-century understandings of the Urban Heat Island (UHI) phenomenon in Singapore here.