Toynbee Prize Foundation names Dr. Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz as new Executive Director

The Toynbee Prize Foundation (TPF) is excited to announce the appointment of Dr. Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz as the new Executive Director.

Originally from the Philippines, Dr. CuUnjieng Aboitiz is currently a Research Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. She holds a Ph.D. with Distinction in Southeast Asian and International History from Yale University, and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. Her first book, Asian Place, Filipino Nation: A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887-1912 is due to be published in spring 2020 with Columbia University Press. It charts the emplotment of 'place' in the proto-national thought and Pan-Asian revolutionary organizing of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Filipino thinkers, and how their constructions of 'Asia' and Malayness connected them to their regional neighbors undertaking the same work.

In becoming Executive Director of the TPF, Dr. CuUnjieng Aboitiz said that she aims "to expand intellectual history beyond the West and to intersect social and cultural history with intellectual history such that the latter is presented as lived experience, not merely abstracted discourse." 

Dr. CuUnjieng Aboitiz replaces Aden Knaap as Executive Director, who has held the position since 2017. Knaap, who is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at Harvard University, is taking up an International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council. 

The Toynbee Prize Foundation was founded in 1987. It awards the Toynbee Prize, which is granted every other year to recognize outstanding work in global history.