Samson Lim

Samson is a historian of Thailand who works on topics related to the history of technology, history of visual culture, and urban studies. He is the author of Siam’s New Detectives: Visualizing Crime and Conspiracy in Modern Thailand (University of Hawaii Press, 2017). The book is a history of the visual culture of policing in Thailand. His work also appears in important scholarly journals. Recent examples include, “Bangkok Electric” in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, “Photography and Forgery” in Technology and Culture, and “Murder! in the Popular Press” in the Journal of Asian Studies. He is currently working on a number of projects, including a history of pushcart vendors and a history of traffic jams in Bangkok.

Prior to joining Monash, Samson was Associate Professor of History and Associate Head of the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Cluster at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. While there, Samson worked on a number of inter-disciplinary research projects, including “Asians Becoming Architects in Colonial Singapore,” funded by the National Heritage Board of Singapore, and “Dense and Green Cities,” a research initiative of Future Cities Lab (Global). He is also part of a multi-disciplinary team funded by the Asian Research Institute in Singapore on a project entitled “Archiving the Underclass: Knowledge, Law, and Agency in Modern Southeast Asia.”

Samson also has a decade of experience working in the field of urban development and planning in cities like Singapore, San Francisco, and Bangkok.