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Prof. Fiona Williamson (Singapore Management University) joins Dr. Philip Gooding to discuss her recently published monograph: Imperial Weather Meteorology, Science, and the Environment in Colonial Malaya (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025). Their discussion covers the development of meteorological science under British rule in colonial Singapore and Malaya, with real implications for how the impacts of global warming are understood in the present.
A specialist in the environmental history of southeast Asia and the wider Indian Ocean World, Prof. Williamson has particular interest in the history of the climate, meteorology and extreme weather in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong.
Scholar profile: https://faculty.smu.edu.sg/profile/fiona-clare-williamson-1066
Book: https://faculty.smu.edu.sg/profile/fiona-clare-williamson-1066
Music: “Nam Nhi-tu” by M. Nguyen Van Minh-Con
Photo Credit: “Storm at Penang Island. Taken on June 2016” by Marufish, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Indian Ocean World podcast is hosted by D. Philip Gooding, produced and edited by Sam Gleave Riemann and Sofia O’Reilly, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership, “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”