Yancheng Zhou is a PhD student in History at the University of Melbourne. His research interests include Southeast Asian history, imperial and colonial history, and water history. His current project examines the estuarine waters surrounding British Penang and Singapore in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, exploring their transformation from political, commercial, and ecological heartlands of the Malay world into contested water frontiers between British colonial power and Malay societies. More broadly, his work seeks to move beyond ethnic-history frameworks and conventional colonial narratives in rethinking Malaysian history. He received his BA in History from Tianjin Normal University and his MA in History from Xiamen University, and previously studied in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Malaya