Marie Ngiam
Marie Ngiam is a first year PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Oslo where she is a member of the ERC-funded project, Ecoart: An Ecological History of Eurasian Art. She holds a Masters degree in World History at the University of Cambridge, partially funded by the British Society of the History of Science where she looked at a collection of botanical essays on Southeast Asian tropical fruit by Republican Chinese intellectual Zhang Liqian (1900–1955),
At the University of Oslo, her research investigates the materiality of early modern objects from an ecocritical perspective, with a particular focus on tropical hardwoods from Southeast Asia. By tracing their global itineraries from forests to workshops and museum collections, a key component of her research looks at how wood (in its many forms) shaped artistic and visual epistemologies in Asia and Europe. She recently participated in the Plant Humanities Summer Program at Dumbarton Oaks.
