The Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography is an important part of the Department’s international visibility and role. The journal began as the Malayan Journal of Tropical Geography (MJTG) which the Department launched in 1953. In 1958, it became the Journal of Tropical Geography (JTG) and in 1980 it was renamed the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (SJTG). Since 1997, it has been jointly published by the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishers. This publishing arrangement has the combined strength of the academic and editorial expertise of the parent Geography Department and the experience and resources of a leading publisher of English-language Geography journals to contribute to its international visibility.

The Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography is therefore well established and recognized as the leading periodical dealing specifically with geographical perspectives on the tropical world including the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania. It acts as a forum for scholars and specialists – not only those working on issues relating to the tropical world from the “outside” but also those who work and live within the tropics. From 2000 onwards, the Journal has been published three times a year in March, July and November.

In addition to the long established focus on tropical environments, over the last decade, the journal has increasingly become a key forum for critical work on the histories of tropical geography, postcolonial perspectives and rethinking of geographies of development. This has been finessed through a set of special issues and annual Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography lectures held at international conferences (and subsequently published in the journal with commentaries). The 2004 lecture for example was presented by Professor Katherine Gibson of the Department of Human Geography, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, who spoke on “Surplus possibilities: postdevelopment and community economies” at the Institute of Australian Geographers Conference held in Adelaide in April that year. Professor Gibson’s address (co-authored with Julie Graham) was published in the March 2005 issue of the SJTG. The 2003 lecture was by Professor Felix Driver at the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), and the 2002 lecture by Professor Michael Watts, presented at the Los Angeles Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers. The July 2005 lecture by Professor John Connell of Sydney University was presented at the Canberra meeting of the International Geographical Union. The latest lecture was given by Prof Aihwa Ong, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley. It is based on the plenary presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in San Francisco in April 2007.

This repositioning of the journal as a leading forum for agenda setting work on development, postcolonialism and the history of representing the tropics and tropicality has been done at the same time as retaining the commitment to publish material on the Journal’s traditional foci on tropical environmental and human dynamics and landscapes, epitomized in the 2004 SJTG lecture on ‘Lessons from the tropics for a global geomorphology’, which was presented by Professor Michael Thomas at the Sixth International Conference on Geomorphology in Zaragoza Spain in September 2005.

The collective result is a unique and important geographical Journal. Important, firstly to those authors working on tropical environments, who find a dedicated intellectual space and a commitment to constructive and prompt review. Important moreover, to many scholars from elsewhere in Asia and Africa (and the wider ‘tropical world’), who are encouraged to submit and develop material for an international audience (almost a quarter of material published in the Journal is from scholars based outside OECD member states and beyond the usual Anglo-American ‘core’ of Anglophone geography). And important in setting agendas across the ‘cutting edge’ of debates about fieldwork, postcolonialism and development.