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[caption id="attachment_3316" align="alignleft" width="140"] James D. Sidaway[/caption]James D. Sidaway, member of the steering committee, has served as a Professor of Political Geography at NUS since January 2012. Previously he was Professor of Political and Cultural Geography at the University of Amsterdam and prior to that a Professor of Human Geography at Plymouth University, UK. During the 1990s, he was a lecturer at the University of Birmingham, UK. Sidaway studies the interactions of cities, development, geopolitics and states, influenced by a wide range of postcolonial writing and theory. His other main research interest is the history and philosophy of geography. Bringing all these together is an enduring fascination with the relationship between geography and a range of area studies traditions. Recently this has led him (with NUS colleague Chih Yuan Woon) to study the reception of China’s “Belt and Road” initiative. Since June 2017, Sidawy has been involved in a new Research Group on Borders, Mobility and New Infrastructures, supported by the Max Weber Foundation. Their foci are: Changing borderscapes in Southeast Asia (and between Southeast Asia and the wider world): air, land and sea; Cross-border infrastructures and new scales and spaces of interaction.