About

I am a cultural historian of early modern Europe and Senior Tutor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore. My research asks how people make sense of time, place and disruption. Its historical core is seventeenth-century Britain, especially the ways writers responded to civil war, regicide and political uncertainty.

My current book manuscript examines the execution of Charles I in 1649 as a moment of intellectual change and adaptation. It traces how astrologers, historians and newsbook authors interpreted an unexpected regicide, and how they placed it within longer narratives of providence, monarchy, generations and rebellion.

Collaborative projects extend these questions into digital history, Indigenous cultural geography, environmental research and public engagement. I use GIS, data visualisation and computer vision to recover Indigenous presence from historical maps, and I work with museums and libraries to connect research, collections and wider audiences.

I hold a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, an MSc in International Relations from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and a joint BA/PhB in History from NUS and the Australian National University. At NUS, I teach European history, cultural astronomy, digital history and public history.

I am Associate Editor of Cambridge Elements in Indigenous Environmental Research, an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and the Royal Historical Society, and a member of the AHRC Peer Review College.

Research

How people understand time, place and disruption, from seventeenth-century print culture to historical maps and public exhibitions.

Time, Crisis and Political Imagination

My research on seventeenth-century Britain examines how people understood time and the future during periods of political crisis. I focus on the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the responses of astrologers, historians and newsbook authors to a sudden rupture in the political order.

By reading almanacs, newsbooks and histories across time, I trace how writers adapted familiar ideas about providence, monarchy, generations and cyclical rebellion to explain the regicide. This work underpins my current book manuscript and has appeared in Historical Research and a Brill volume on monarchy in early modern Europe.

A related strand of research examines how ideas about place shape political possibility. My MSc research analysed the geographical imaginations embedded in the negotiations of the Antarctic and Outer Space Treaties.

Historical Maps and Digital Methods

I use GIS, data visualisation and computer vision to recover information that is difficult to see in large collections of historical sources. The methods serve historical questions about how places were named, represented and understood.

As Digital Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the AHRC-funded Brightening the Covenant Chain project, I processed British Library maps of colonial North America to create a dataset for an interactive Kinetic Map. Developed with the Treatied Spaces Research Group and King’s Digital Lab, the map traces Indigenous and non-Indigenous movement, settlement and diplomacy across the northeast.

An Alan Turing Postdoctoral Enhancement Award supported my collaboration with The Alan Turing Institute on high-performance computing and computer vision for early modern maps. At NUS, I also contribute to a project that extracts meteorological observations from ships’ logbooks to study historical rainfall patterns in Southeast Asia.

Public and Environmental Histories

My public and environmental work connects historical research with museums, Indigenous collections and questions of sustainability. With the American Museum & Gardens and the North American Native Museum in Zurich, I have worked on the interpretation of Indigenous materials and on digital connections between collections and source communities.

I am Associate Editor of Cambridge Elements in Indigenous Environmental Research. The series publishes interdisciplinary work on relationships between environmental change and Indigenous social, cultural and political life.

I have also examined the social and cultural dimensions of sustainability in orbital space. This work includes a university consortium project on how UK space-sector organisations can assess the wider effects of their activities, alongside research on the public memory of space debris incidents.

Publications

Research publications

Matthias Meng Yan Wong. “Charles I’s Execution and the Destiny of Monarchy in Britain and Europe.” In Monarchy, the Court, and the Provincial Elite in Early Modern Europe, 54–72. Brill, 2024. DOI

Matthias Meng Yan Wong. “A Pause in Time: History Writers and the Regicide of Charles I.” Historical Research 94, no. 266 (2021): 758–781. Open-access article

Methods contributions

Matthias Meng Yan Wong. “Using Correspondence and Manuscripts in Literary Archives.” In Research Methods for Primary Sources. SAGE/Adam Matthew, 2021. DOI

Matthias Meng Yan Wong. “Using Newspapers as Historical Sources.” In Research Methods for Primary Sources. SAGE/Adam Matthew, 2021. DOI

Dissertation

Matthias Meng Yan Wong. The Impact of the Regicide of Charles I on Contemporary English Notions of Time and the Future. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2019. Cambridge repository

For the current institutional record, see my NUS profile or ORCID.

Projects & Engagement

Beyond the Page

In 2025, I helped oversee Beyond the Page, a collaboration between the NUS Department of History and the NUS History Society. Students interviewed 12 History alumni, researched the Department’s archives and translated their findings into an exhibition at NUS Central Library. The project combined oral-history training with practical experience in curation and public communication.

Walking Through a Songline

I convened the Singapore iteration of Walking Through a Songline, an immersive digital exhibition created by the National Museum of Australia and Mosster Studio. Presented at NUS Central Library in 2025–26, the programme included an interdisciplinary public discussion about evidence and ways of knowing across history, physics, museum practice and Indigenous knowledge systems.

Indigenous collections and digital access

My museum work has focused on interpretation, digital access and relationships between Indigenous collections and source communities. I led development work on Sharing Stories Across the Ocean, an AHRC-supported collaboration with the North American Native Museum in Zurich. I have also worked with the American Museum & Gardens in Bath through the Treatied Spaces research programme.

Green Toolkit for a New Space Economy

I co-led a university consortium project on how UK space-sector organisations could assess the social, cultural and environmental effects of their activities. Funded by the UK Space Agency, the project brought together collaborators in history, law, physics, cybersecurity and user design from the Universities of Hull, Edinburgh and Southampton, York St John University and an industry partner.

The University of Hull awarded this work its Best Knowledge Exchange Postdoc prize in 2022.

Decolonising UK history provision in schools

I have worked with Pearson Edexcel and AQA on history subject specifications and the review of GCSE textbooks. I have also co-authored evidence and contributed research expertise to the UK Parliament.

Media and outreach

I have contributed historical research and commentary to Channel NewsAsia. This included research and filming for the 2024 On the Red Dot: Family Mysteries episode, an interview on CNA938 and commentary for CNA news articles. I have also given guest lectures for schools in Singapore on historical geography, digital history and the evaluation of evidence.

Teaching

I teach European history, cultural astronomy, public and applied history, and digital history at the National University of Singapore. Across these areas, I help students connect historical questions with close source criticism and practical methods such as oral history, GIS and exhibition-making.

Recent NUS courses

GEC1050 Skyscapes: Cultural Interpretations of the Sky
HY2264 The Making of Modern Europe
GEC1030 Metropolis: The City in World History
HY5405 Applied and Public History: Theory, Method and Practice
HY5419 Digital History: Theory and Practice
HY5422 Time and Space: Doing History with GIS
HY5301 Internship in History

Learning through public history

My public-history teaching gives students experience in researching for audiences beyond the classroom. In Beyond the Page, students conducted oral-history interviews, worked with departmental archives and developed an exhibition for NUS Central Library.

Before joining NUS, I taught seminars on temporality and gender for History undergraduates at the University of Cambridge, as well as postgraduate workshops on research development and presentation. At the University of Hull, I designed training for graduate interns in digital storytelling, data visualisation and research practice.

Matthias Wong

About

Research

Publications

Engagement

Teaching

Contact

About

Research

Time, Crisis and Political Imagination

Historical Maps and Digital Methods

Public and Environmental Histories

Publications

Research publications

Methods contributions

Dissertation

Projects & Engagement

Beyond the Page

Walking Through a Songline

Indigenous collections and digital access

Green Toolkit for a New Space Economy

Decolonising UK history provision in schools

Media and outreach

Teaching

Recent NUS courses

Learning through public history