Sim Hinman Wan

Sim Hinman Wan is a historian of architecture, urbanism, and spatial culture. His research addresses the transregional, Indigenous, and ethnoculturally hybrid Asian protagonists in the early modern development of Southeast Asia’s European-occupied port cities. It also considers how the intersecting peoples and societies at these colonized settings exhibited divergent architectural responses to land, water, natural resources, and other environmental features. He is currently working on a book project, titled Intertwined Genealogies: Dutch, Chinese, and Colonial Indonesian Architecture of Philanthropy, 1640–1740. This project foregrounds the overlapping Dutch and Chinese innovation of post-monastic asylums for indigent groups, emerging during the proto-capitalist phase of global trade and migration, as an integral yet underexamined component of Indonesia’s preindustrial urbanization. The narrative of intertwined genealogies contributes to the postcolonial deterritorialization of the existing north-south and east-west geographic fragmentation in built environmental history.

Dr Wan has received Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awards from the Social Science Research Council and the Council on Library and Information Resources that support international and interdisciplinary scholarship. His most recent essays have appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, the University of Pennsylvania Press journal of conservation and the built environment Change Over Time, and the multidisciplinary journal Early Modern Low Countries. With a professional background in architectural design, sustainable building science, museum collections management, and exhibition curation, Dr Wan is broadly interested in the humanistic study of architecture and art for advancing the critical practices of historic preservation, heritage education, and community planning. He has taught at the University of Hong Kong and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

As a global itinerant descended from two historically migratory ethnocultures, the Hakka and Hui Chinese, Dr Wan is honored to have the opportunity to live on the ancestral lands of Indigenous American nations, including the pre-contact Adena and Hopewell cultures, the Seneca, Monongahela, Osage, and Wyandot peoples, and the Lenape (Delaware), Shawnee, Mingo, and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy refugees.