Dr Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz

Originally from the Philippines, Dr Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz is an Associate at Clare Hall, Supervisor in World History, and the Executive Director of the Toynbee Prize Foundation. Immediately prior, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. She gained her PhD in Southeast Asian and International History at Yale University. Her broad research interests centre on global intellectual history and Southeast Asian environmental, cultural, and social history.

Her first book, Asian Place, Filipino Nation: A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887-1912, was published by Columbia University Press in June 2020. It charts the emplotment of ‘place’ in the proto-national thought and revolutionary organising of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Filipino thinkers. It analyses how their Pan-Asian political organising and their constructions of the place of ‘Asia’ and of the spatial registers of race/Malayness connected them to their regional neighbours undertaking the same work. Asian Place, Filipino Nation unearths precisely what ground the Philippine nation has built itself upon intellectually, excavating its neglected cosmopolitan and transnational Asian and Malay moorings in particular, in order to reconnect modern Philippine history to that of Southeast and East Asia, from which it has been historiographically separated. 

Through her work at the Toynbee Prize Foundation, Dr CuUnjieng Aboitiz seeks to ground a greater focus on the early modern period and inclusion of the Global South in the premiere hub for global history. She is also an Institute Fellow at the Institute for Transnational & Spatial History at the University of St Andrews. Outside academia, she is a Board Member of Lokal Lab, a sustainability and biodiversity NGO on the island of Siargao in the Philippines, where she also lives and surfs.