Dien Min Loong

Loong (she/her) is a doctoral student in the Department of History at Yale University. With a regional focus on South and Southeast Asia, her research examines the late colonial and postcolonial histories of sexuality, childhood, and law. Her doctoral project explores the transregional history of the “illegitimate child” as an object of knowledge and governmentality shaped by the sociolegal infrastructures and sexual economies of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indian Ocean and South China Sea worlds.

Prior to Yale, Loong was a Gates Cambridge Scholar at University of Cambridge, where she completed an MPhil in World History. She also led Imagined Malaysia, a Kuala Lumpur–based public history organization dedicated to fostering critical and collaborative engagements with Malaysian history. Loong additionally serves as the pedagogical advisor for Malaysia Unbound, a participatory public research project developed in partnership with University of Bristol History Department and supported by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. Through workshops, public forums, and social media campaigns, the project invites Malaysians aged 18 to 60 to critically examine official, ethnonationalist, and elite historical narratives through everyday objects and non-official archives.