About The Site

Citizen Historian could be perceived as a bunch of post-grad history students engaging in a superfluous extra-curricula project, saddled with pretentious ambitions and hopefully to score career points for the future. (Or we actually do have plenty of free time in between coursework and tutorials and dissertations!)

But really, we’re just a small group like-minded students of history and interested members of society. And this web-journal is one way of addressing several concerns we have:

Lost Discourses:

When researching, writing and teaching history, we often come across little gold flecks of information that lead us to question long-held assumptions and perceptions. And all of a sudden, you have an itch that needs to be scratched, a curiosity that must be satisfied.

However, these curiosities are often orphaned by time and neglect. Practical obligations, focusing as they usually do on the final product (e.g. results, grades, career-advancement, babies, parents), provides only a final but limited range of ideas.

Or perhaps that idea of yours has taken shape before. But the only person that saw it was your thesis supervisor, and right now, it’s sitting forlornly on your bookshelf, a testament to former glory.

Citizen Historian hopes to be such a discursive intellectual (but light and fun) shelter for orphaned ideas and hidden work. We believe that knowledge created only exists if it is shared – and that’s what we want to do – to get these ideas out into the light.

Researching History:

History is not a stagnant school subject or academic discipline. Its practitioners interact unavoidably with societal concerns, national imperatives, institutional constraints, and our own individual impulses. Even the ivory tower of academia pays taxes - history exists in a real world.

And it is practiced by real people. Whether as academics bidding to distinguish themselves from their peers, as teachers inciting discussion during class, or as working professionals preparing to pitch for a multi-million dollar contract, we are always creating or re-creating methods and techniques for the gathering, handling and presenting of information.

We want to take up the slack: to highlight the earlier - just as crucial - stages of the historical research and knowledge dissemination process, to show the hard work and sometimes sheer luck necessary to arrive at the final product.

And we’d also like to highlight the post-production process. History is useless? We don’t think so. But as they say - where’s your citation on that? We want to show that learning history has indeed helped its practitioners in everyday life or in their careers. Learning doesn’t stop when you leave the school, and what you learned doesn’t stop helping you.

Being a Citizen:

Historians have always played a part in the societies they choose to practice their craft in. We feel that there is a certain responsibility to the discipline and its wider community to encourage discussion on historical research and ideas. We also realise the far-reaches of the history graduate and amateur practitioners of history in both public and private spheres of society

We hope to provide a space for a sharing of stories, experiences and ideas concerning being a historian, or just practicing history (as a student, teacher, academic, or working professional) in Singapore; tales which could hopefully inspire and invigorate other budding and veteran practitioners.

Citizen Historian wants to bring together current history students, ex-history students who’d like to get back in the game, and those who’ve never actually studied history, but merely live and think and breathe it every day. And we’re doing it because all of us have something to share - about the discipline we grapple with, the subject we teach, the historical ideas or methods we use, and but most of all, the hobby we love.