Shabbir Hussain Mustafa is Curator with the NUS Museum. His research interests are in modern Southeast Asian history. Within a broader framework of the archival-curatorial method being developed at the NUS Museum, his approach has centred heavily on deploying archival texts as ploys in engaging different modes of thinking and writing, all in an attempt at opening up the archive to multivariate struggles of perception and reading. Some exhibitions that Mustafa has curated include: Persistent Visions | Erika Tan (2009); Archives and Desires: Selections from the Mohammad Din Mohammad Collection (2009); Camping and Tramping through the Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya (2011); Writing Power | Zulkifli Yusoff (2011) and Semblance/Presence: Renato Habulan and Alfredo Esquillo Jr. (2012).
Mustafa presented Camping and Tramping through the Colonial Archive and participated in the Para Site International Conference 2013.