Dr. Stephan Dobbs

sdobbs@arts.uwa.edu.au

ph: 6488 2002

Stephen lectures in Asian Studies at the University of Western Australia and has a long standing interest in the social and political history of Southeast Asia. He has research interests in the region’s maritime history as well as Islam in the Malay Muslim world. His main countries of specialisation are Singapore and Malaysia.

He is currently researching the pilgrim traffic from Malaya and Singapore to Mecca during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. He is particularly interested in how changes in maritime transport (steam ships) facilitated the passage of greater numbers of pilgrims from the Malayan region as well as the various measures adopted by the British colonial authorities to try and regulate this increasingly large movement of people.

Stephen’s publications include, The Singapore River: A Social History 1819-2002 (Singapore University Press, 2003); Tuan Djek: A Biography (Times Academic Press, 2002); ‘Entrepot of trade: Southeast Asia until the 1870s’, in The Southeast Asian Handbook (Regional Handbooks of Economic Development) (Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001); ‘Singapore’ in Oxford University Press’ Encyclopaedia of Maritime History s.v. ‘Social History/ports and labour’, (forthcoming)