Kwa Chong Guan is a Member of the National Heritage Board and Chairman of its National Archives Board. He is also a member of the Asian Civilisations Board and chairs its Acquisition Sub-committee. Kwa’s association with oral history and museums started in the mid-1980’s when he was seconded to reorganize the Oral History Center and concurrently the old National Museum, which he lead through a strategic planning process to expand it to its current three museums and their consolidation under the National Heritage Board. He was also founding Chairman of the Singapore Philatelic Museum and consultant to the Malay Heritage Foundation on the establishment of their museum. More recently, Kwa helped the Singapore Armed Forces plan and develop their Army Museum. Kwa has also taught history at the National Institute of Education and the National University of Singapore as a member of their adjunct staff. Kwa serves as Head of External Programmes at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies at the Nanyang Technological University where is involved in various regional security projects ranging from energy and security to policy analysis for regional security crisis management.

Prof Tan is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Director of the Institute of South Asian Studies, and Professor of History at the National University of Singapore. He has written extensively on South Asian history as well as on Southeast Asia and Singapore. His recent books include Creating ‘Greater Malaysia’: Decolonisation and the Politics of Merger (2008); Partition and Post-Colonial South Asia: A Reader (co-edited, 2007); The Garrison State (2005), The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (co-authored, 2000) and The Transformation of Southeast Asia: International Perspectives on De-colonisation (co-edited, 2003).

Prof Heng is an Assistant Professor at the Department of History, Ohio State University, where he teaches pre-modern Asian history, historical thought and methodology, and world history before AD 1500. He researches the pre-modern economic interaction between Southeast Asia and China, pre-modern state formation of coastal port-states in Maritime Southeast Asia and the historiography of Singapore’s past. He is the author of Sino-Malay Trade and Diplomacy in the 10th-14th Centuries AD (Athens: Ohio University Press, Oct 2009), and the editor of New Perspectives and Sources on the History of Singapore: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach (Singapore: National Library Board, 2006), and Reframing Singapore: Memory, Identity and Trans-Regionalism (Amsterdam: Amster University Press, August 2009).