Timothy began his undergraduate studies in the astronomical sciences before pivoting into history. Since then he has been working as an administrative assistant for the department before joining their 2021 graduate cohort as an M.A. student.

Tim is interested in the mechanisms by which individuals and communities construct imaginations of race, class, and gender through the popular media.

Research Interests

• Empire & Colonialism
• Race, Ethnicity, & Nationalism
• Migration, Borderlands, & Transnational History
• Gender, Sexuality, & the Body
• Critical Media Analysis
• Southeast Asian History

For his Master’s Thesis, he is conducting research on editorial cartoons published across different language newspapers in 1930s British Malaya. Through a comparative analysis of these comics, he contends with how these authors addressed socioeconomic anxieties that grew out of the capitalist colonial structures of Penang and Singapore, and how they expressed these anxieties across gender, racial, and class lines.

Conference Presentation: “A White Woman in Malaya: The racialization of consumerist and colonial power and status through depictions of white womanhood in 1930s Malay-language newspapers.” Will be presented at the Association of Asian Studies 2026 Annual Conference, 2026.

Dean of Arts Graduate Student Research Award, University of British Columbia, 2025

John Roosa