Derek Heng

Derek Heng

Derek Heng's research interests center the state formation of Maritime Southeast Asian states in the pre-modern era, and the trans-regional interactions, including trade, diplomacy, culture and migration, between Southeast Asia, China and India up to the early colonial period. He works with Malay and Chinese classical texts, epigraphic material and archaeological data to extract and postulate on the nature of relations between states and economies, and their respective changes over time. He also contributes to the discourse on the historiography of modern-day Singapore, examining the intertwined relationship between academic historical research, political rhetoric and the construction of the national narrative. His publications include Singapore: A Seven-Hundred Year History (Singapore: National Archives of Singapore, 2009), Reframing Singapore: Memory, Identity and Trans-Regionalism (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), and Sino-Malay Trade and Diplomacy in the Tenth to Fourteenth Centuries (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009).