Sandra Khor Manickam is a historian of colonial Malaya and Southeast Asia with an emphasis on the history of anthropology, race and medicine.is a historian of colonial Malaya and Southeast Asia with an emphasis on the history of anthropology, race and medicine.

More information about Sandra Manickam

Research

History of anthropology, race and medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries Southeast Asia; intersections of medicine, colonialism and war under British colonialism and Japanese occupation; history of photography of Orang Asli.

Grants and awards

• L’Oréal-UNESCO, NIAS-KNAW For Women in Science Fellowship (FWiS) 2020-2021;
• Sumitomo Japan-Related Research Grant 2017-2018;
• Nanyang Technological University Start Up Grant (SUG) Award 2014.

CV

• Senior Researcher, COMET (current - 2028)
• Assistant Professor (tenured), Department of History, ESHCC, Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) 2017 - Present
• Assistant Professor, History Programme, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, 2014 – 2016
• Junior Professor (W1), Department of Southeast Asian Studies, Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main (Goethe),  2012 – 2014
• PhD in History (2011), Australia National University
• MA in History (2005), National University of Singapore
• BA in History and Economics (2000), University of Southern California

Key publications

• Manickam, Taming the Wild: Aborigines and Racial Knowledge in Colonial Malaya (Singapore: NUS Press, 2015)
• Manickam, "Tracing Din bin Brahim: (Re)constructing a life from the margins of Ivor H.N. Evans’s anthropological and colonial archives", JSEAS (accepted for publication)
• Bruns, Zurne, Manickam, "Reworking the Visual Legacies of Colonial Photographic Archives With and Through the Self: A Conversation With Dzifa Peters and Nurul Huda Rashid", Vista 17  e026001 (2026)
• Manickam, "Racial narrations in the Malay Archipelago during the Asia-Pacific War", Imagined Racial Laboratories: Colonial and National Racialisations in Southeast Asia (Brill, 2023)
• Manickam, "Andō's Ambiguities in Malaya: The Life of a Japanese Medical Doctor Between British and Japanese Empires," East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (EASTS, 2022)