kwalker@fas.harvard.edu

Kirsty Walker is a social and cultural historian who specializes in transnational approaches to intimacy and colonialism in Southeast Asian history. 

Her first book project, provisionally entitled Creole Shadow Empire: A History of Intimacy in Southeast Asia, examines an intersecting network of creole diasporas in colonial and early post-colonial Southeast Asia. Through a series of intimate histories of interethnic encounters, the book reveals the ways in which creole families used cultural, legal and political arenas to negotiate their own definitions of identity, legitimacy, and citizenship.

She received her PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, and she also holds an MA from Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang. Her other research and teaching interests include the politics of vice in colonial Southeast Asia, histories of vagabondage in transnational Asia, and public health in global perspective.

She was also a research associate of the Harvard University Department of History from 2016 to 2017.

Publications

'Intimate Interactions: Eurasian Family Histories in Colonial Penang', Modern Asian Studies, 42, 2 (March 2012), pp. 303-329.

‘The Influenza Pandemic of 1918 in Southeast Asia’, in Tim Harper and Sunil S. Amrith eds., Histories of Health in Southeast Asia: Perspectives on the Long Twentieth Century (Indiana, 2014), pp. 61-71.

‘Economic Crises and Health in Historical Perspective’, Historical Journal, 53, 2 (2010), pp. 477-94.