About Benjamin Goh

I am an incoming candidate in the MPhil in World History at the University of Cambridge, focusing on the history of British Southeast Asia in the 1950s. More generally, I am a historian of Singapore with specific interests in the global histories of education and youth in Singapore. I work from the conviction that local developments in Singapore cannot be understood without considering the global contexts in which they operated in. Transnational narratives are thus key to my scholarship. As part of this research agenda, my undergraduate thesis at Yale-NUS College explored the global history of post-independence Singapore’s first sex education programme between 1966 and 1980. Here, I pioneered a novel approach to studying sex education by considering it as part of broader family planning programmes undertaken in the Global South by family planning associations and post-independence governments. In my postgraduate work at the University of Cambridge, I examine the role public intellectuals, academics and universities played in the decolonisation of Singapore and Malaya in the 1950s, and the development of a Malayan consciousness and nationalism. I also maintain a broad interest in Singapore’s socio-political history, particularly in the areas of gender, sexuality, intellectual and cultural history. As an undergraduate, I also minored in Urban Studies and maintain interests in urban history, heritage studies, and sociology in general.