Dr Christina Skott

College positions: Official Fellow, Director of Studies in History and Politics, Tutor

University position: Affiliated Lecturer

Subject: History

E-mail:

mcg27@cam.ac.uk

Tel:

01223 332832

Christina Skott holds degrees from the Sibelius Academy of Music, Helsinki, and Hum. Cand. and Mag. Phil. degrees in history and art history from the University of Helsinki. In the 1980s and 1990s she published and taught art history in Finland, Singapore and the Philippines. She subsequently embarked on a doctorate in history at the University of Cambridge, where her 2004 dissertation examined early modern European knowledge of Southeast Asia. She was a Fellow, Tutor and Director of Studies in History at Wolfson College, Cambridge, between 2005 and 2017. In 2012-2013 she held the post of Junior Proctor of the University of Cambridge.

Christina has been directing studies in history at Magdalene since 2008, and is also Director of Studies for the joint degree History and Politics. As an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of History, she lectures on European expansion in early modern Asia and supervises undergraduate papers on world history. She also enjoys supervising undergraduate dissertations on Southeast Asia and colonial knowledge in the long early modern era.

Christina’s research has revolved around European interactions with Asia, resulting in publications on knowledge of Asia in eighteenth century European botany and anthropology, the Swedish East India Company, and knowledge production in early British expansion into Southeast Asia. Her present research is concerned with economic botany, colonial agriculture and ecology in the Malay Peninsula in the nineteenth century, where she is particularly interested in the role of indigenous agriculture in the emergence of plantation economies, and how this process informed global environmental concerns.