Roger Nelson

Roger Nelson joined the Division of Art History in the School of Humanities in August 2022, where he teaches modern and contemporary Southeast Asian and global art histories. He was a curator at National Gallery Singapore from January 2019 to July 2022, where he worked on research, exhibitions and collections related to Southeast Asian and global modern and contemporary art. Concurrently, he taught at the National University of Singapore in the Minor in Art History. Previously, he was a CLASS (Centre for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences) postdoctoral fellow at NTU from September 2017 to January 2019. During his postdoctoral fellowship, he completed several journal articles and book chapters, and curated an exhibition at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore ‘Lab’ drawing on his research on art historiographical projects in the region. He also completed a translation and introduction to Suon Sorin’s 1961 Khmer novel, A New Sun Rises Over the Old Land, published by NUS Press in 2019. This book – one of the first English translations of a modern Cambodian novel – was awarded the A.L. Becker Southeast Asian Literature in Translation Prize, awarded by Association for Asian Studies in 2022. Prior to moving to Singapore, Roger lived and worked in Phnom Penh, Cambodia while completing a PhD on ‘Cambodian arts’ of the 20th and 21st century at the University of Melbourne. He has curated exhibitions and other projects in Singapore, Cambodia, Australia, Thailand, and Vietnam, and regularly serves as nominator and juror for international exhibitions, awards and foundations, such as the inaugural Artist Excellence Award at Vietnam’s Factory Contemporary Arts Centre in 2021 and the 58th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2022. In addition to his scholarly publications, Roger’s writing has been widely published in specialist art magazines including Artforum and ArtAsiaPacific. Roger is the co-founder and co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published in print and online by NUS Press, and available freely via Open Access on Project Muse with generous support from Chen Chong Swee Asian Arts Programme at Yale-NUS College and the Foundation for Arts Initiatives.