Professor Sujit Sivasundaram

Sujit Sivasundaram was born and educated in Sri Lanka (in 'Sinhala medium' until 1992) and came to Cambridge in 1994 to study engineering and then natural sciences and history and philosophy of science. In 2008-10 he taught at the London School of Economics in South Asian and Imperial History. In 2012 he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for History. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris; a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore and the University of Sydney. He was the Sackler Caird Fellow, 2015-7, at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. He is a Councillor of the Royal Historical Society. 

Sujit Sivasundaram has worked primarily on the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries in the Indian and Pacific oceans, with a special emphasis on South and Southeast Asia and Polynesia. His research is thus grounded in two separate regions set apart from each other by about eight thousand miles. He has worked thematically on the intersection of empires and globalisation with the environment, culture, technology, anthropology, science and medicine. He has published edited work on primary sources in the history of race. His writings have intervened in maritime and oceanic history. Through separate research projects he is developing methods for world histories alongside and within 'area studies', to help reconsider processes of bordering - eg. by focusing on islands (and the phenomenon of 'islanding'). His earlier work on Christian missionaries and scientific knowledge has led on to a focus on material culture - and in particular the layering of different materialities (eg. oral/print, genealogical/historical) in the rise of History as a world discipline. He has also worked on the complex of the human and animal in colonial contexts (eg. elephants, 'wolf children').

He is near completing a book for Harper Collins, 'Waves of the South', which links the British empire and the age of revolutions in the oceans of the global South - the Indian and Pacific seas. Foregrounded here are the Tasman Sea, the Bay of Bengal, the Persian Gulf, Polynesia, and the Southwest Indian Ocean. The book tracks a matritime patriotism of the British Empire as it overtook the pulses - connected to culture, knowledge, trade and religion - which spanned the seas before it. He has worked in archives across the Indo-Pacific world for this project.

For Cambridge University Press, he is editing a summation of where the global turn has taken the discipline of the history of science, tentatively titled, Histories of the Sciences: Globe, Area, Empire, Nation and Beyond.

Recent papers and lectures include: the 2018 Fennell Lecture at the University of Edinburgh; a keynote to the International Congress of the History of Science in Rio, Brazil and a keynote in Brisbane, Australia to the David Nichol Smith Seminar.

The Part II Specified Paper, Paper 30 ''Islands and Beaches'': The Pacific and Indian Oceans in the Long Nineteenth Century', closely mirrors present research interests. Sujit Sivasundaram also teaches/convenes the Themes and Sources paper, 'The History of Collecting', with Melissa Calaresu and Peter Mandler; this represents a long-term commitment to teaching in museum settings. 

He supervises MPhil and PhD students working in the broad field of world and imperial history and is especially interested in translocal and transregional projects. Please get in touch if you would like to discuss potential post-graduate research.

The following PhD students have recently completed/are reaching submission:

Sandagomi Coperahewa (Professor at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka) on 'The Politics of Language in Colonial Sri Lanka, c.1900-1948';  Dwayne Menezes on 'Hybridity, Agency and the Catholics of South Canara'; Jagjeet Lally (lecturer at University College London, UK) on 'Indo-Central Asian Trade, c.1600-1900'; Kate Stevens (postdoc at University of Otago, New Zealand) on 'Criminal Justice, race and gender in the colonial Southwest Pacific, 1880-1920'; Tom Simpson (research fellow, Gonville and Caius), 'Frontiers in North-west and North-east British India'; Hatice Yildiz (research fellow, Merton College, Oxford), 'A Comparative History of Gender and Factory Labour in Ottoman Bursa and Colonial Bombay, c.1850-1910';  Alix Chartrand, 'The Evolution of British Imperial Perceptions in Ireland and India, c.1650-1800'; James Wilson, 'The Anglo-Dutch Imperial Meridian in the Indian Ocean world, 1795-1820' and, Steph Mawson (research fellow elect, St. John's College), 'Incomplete Conquests in the Philippine Archipelago, 1565-1700.'

Current PhD students are working on the following topics: liberated Africans and public spheres in the nineteenth-century South Atlantic in Brazil, Sierra Leone and South Africa; the history of mountain-science in the Himalayas and the creation of global verticality; Khoja migration across the Indian ocean and the gender history of pearl diving in the Indian Ocean. Second supervisor for a PhD on the American Protestant encounters in the Pacific (with Andrew Preston).