Dr Christina Skott

Christina Skott (formerly Christina Granroth) studied church music in her native Finland, graduating from the Sibelius Academy of Music in 1980. She read art history and European history at the University of Helsinki, receiving her MA in 1986. She has published works in the fields of Finnish and art history. In 1989, she moved to Southeast Asia, teaching European art history in Singapore and at the University of the Philippines. After moving to the UK in 1998, she took up doctoral studies in history at Cambridge, and received her PhD in 2003. Her dissertation examined European knowledge of Southeast Asia in the early modern era, mainly through travel writing and European scholarship.

Christina has been a Tutor at Wolfson since 2005 and Director of Studies in History since 2008. As a member of the History Faculty, she teaches World history and the history of colonialism and European empires, and lectures on colonial knowledge in early modern Europe. Her present research interests include knowledge of Asia in the development of 18th century anthropology and natural history, and the early modern history of the Malay world. Among her recent publications are an edited travel journal from Java by the Swedish naturalist C F Hornstedt, Brev från Batavia (‘Letters from Batavia’, 2008), ‘Imagined centrality: Sir Stamford Raffles and the birth of modern Singapore’ (in Singapore from Temasek to the 21st century, Singapore University Press, 2010) and ‘The VOC and Swedish natural history: The transmission of scientific knowledge in the eighteenth century’ (in The Dutch trading companies as knowledge networks, Brill 2010).

Christina is also Director of Studies (Part I) and College Lecturer in History at Magdalene College. She is a longstanding member of the Wolfson Choir.