Pacific Circle Officers

President

Anthony D. Medrano is an assistant professor of Southeast Asian history at Brown University as well as an affiliated faculty in the Science, Technology, and Society program. His teaching and scholarship revolve around the histories and legacies of economic life, scientific practice, and biodiversity research in Southeast Asia. At the heart of Anthony’s pedagogical, public-facing, and scholarly work is a focus on the productions and circulations of local knowledge and cultural expertise–particularly about plants, fishes, and their uses and habitats. He’s co-editor (with Eunice J. Tan and Tanisha Naqvi) of Wild Life: Stories of Singapore Biodiversity (2025), editor of Fishways (2025), and editor of Lala-Land: Singapore’s Seafood Heritage (2024), which won the Juliet David Best Food Book Award in 2025. His book-in-progress, The Edible Ocean: Science, Industry, and the Rise of Urban Southeast Asia, is under contract with Yale University Press. It charts a history of the ocean through the story of fish and ichthyology, showing how and explaining why the city depended on the sea in the first half of the twentieth century. Anthony’s recent writings have appeared in the following edited volumes: Singaporean Plants (forthcoming), Halo-Halo Ecologies (2025), and Singaporean Creatures (2024).

Vice Presidents

Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor in the Departments of Southeast Asian Studies and Malay Studies at the National University of Singapore. She received a PhD in history from Yale University in 2018. Her research interests center on religion and ecology, environmental justice and indigenous movements in island Southeast Asia. Her first monograph The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia was published by University of Washington Press in 2023; it won the Harry J. Benda Prize in 2025 and was shortlisted for best book in social science by the European Society for Southeast Asian Studies in 2024. Her current project includes the history of astronomy in maritime Southeast Asia and she also co-coordinates a digital humanities project on comparative Asian medicine. 

Secretary

Dr. Jonathan Galka is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Science, Technology & Society Cluster of the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and a member of the Deep Currents Collective. He earned his PhD in the History of Science at Harvard University in 2025. His dissertation examining the 20th-century identification of deep-sea manganese nodules as scientific, political, and economic resources, queries how the construction of nodules as a mineral resource frontier imbricated the biological and geological sciences with Cold War and postcolonial ocean law and politics and reshaped modern ocean governance in the process. Jonathan has been continuing this work in Singapore, as deep-sea nodules take on renewed significance in new energy transitions. Jonathan is concurrently beginning a second project on the history and future of transpacific efforts to bring deep seawater onto land. His historical and ethnographic work on oceanic resource frontiers appears in Historical Studies of the Natural Sciences, Social Studies of Science, and History & Philosophy of the Life Sciences.

Digital Officer

Katherine Enright is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation, a collaborative doctoral partnership with the University’s Museum of Zoology, examines the politics, practices, and products of expeditionary science in the Malay Peninsula at the turn of the 20th century. With a focus on museum objects, it explores the relationship between salvage ethnography, resource extraction, and the ‘natural’ sciences of zoology, botany, and geology. She is also interested in curatorial approaches to colonial scientific collections, including specimen databases. In 2024, she earned an MPhil in Digital Humanities as a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Her research, including collaborative, multi-disciplinary work in environmental humanities, has appeared in TAXON, Archives of Natural History, the Plant Humanities Lab, and the literary journal SUSPECT.

Treasurer

Bronwen Douglas, School of Archaeology & Anthropology, ANU. Professor Douglas taught Pacific History and wrote ethnographic histories of New Caledonia and south Vanuatu until the mid-1990s. She has since combined the ethnohistory of encounters in Oceania with the history of the human sciences and the sciences of place. She was co-editor of the Journal of Pacific History in 2014-2018. Among Professor Douglas’ publications are Science, Voyages, and Encounters in Oceania 1511-1850 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Collecting in the South Sea: The Voyage of Bruni d’Entrecateaux 1791-1794 (Sidestone Press, 2018) and Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750-1940 (ANU ePress, 2008).