Biography
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.
Research Interests
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.
Teaching
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).
Publications
BOOKS
- Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2005, paperback 2011).
- Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony (University of Chicago Press, 2013; South Asian ed. from Oxford University, Press, Delhi, 2014 with foreword by Gananath Obeyesekere). Press review from Sri Lankan national newspaper, Daily News (Jan 2016).
- Science, Race and Imperialism ed. with Marwa Elshakry in Victorian Science and Literature, Vol 6, eds. Bernard Lightman and Gowan Dawson (Chatto and Pickering, 2012).
- Oceanic Histories ed. with David Armitage and Alison Bashford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
EDITED COLLECTIONS
- Editor, Focus section for Isis on 'Global histories of science' with own contribution titled, 'Sciences and the Global: On Methods, Questions and Theory' Isis, Vol. 101, 2010, pp.146-158. This forum includes essays by Marwa Elshakry, Shruti Kapila, Niel Safier and Helen Tilley.
- Co-editor with Rohan Deb Roy, special issue, 'Nonhuman empires' in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol.35, 2015, pp.66-173, with own contribution titled, 'Imperial Transgressions: The Animal and Human in the Idea of Race.' This special issue includes essays by Alan Mikhail, Jagjeet Lally, Rebecca J. H. Woods and Etienne Benson
SOME ARTICLES
- 'Ethnicity, Indegeneity and Migration in the Advent of British Rule to Sri Lanka' in American Historical Review, 2010, pp.428-452.
- 'Buddhist Kingship, British Archaeology and Historical Narratives in Sri Lanka, c.1750-1850', in Past and Present, No. 197, 2007, pp.111-142.
- 'Towards a Critical History of Connection: The Port of Colombo, the Geographical 'Circuit' and the Visual Politics of New Imperialism c.1880-1914' in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 59, 2017, pp.346-384.
- 'The Oils of Empire' in Helen Curry, Nick Jardine, James Secord and Emma Spary, eds. Worlds of Natural History, (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp.379-398.
- 'Appropriation to Supremacy: Ideas of the 'native' in the rise of British imperial heritage' in Astrid Swenson and Peter Mandler eds. From Plunder to Preservation: Britain and the Heritage of Empire. c.1800-1940 (Oxford University Press, 2013), pp.149-170.
- 'Science' in David Armitage and Alison Bashford eds. Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
- 'Islanded: Natural History in the British Colonization of Ceylon' in David Livingstone and Charlie Withers eds. Geographies of Nineteenth-century Science (University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp.123-148.
- 'Race, Empire and Biology before Darwin' in Denis Alexander and Ron Numbers eds. Biology and Ideology (University of Chicago Press, 2010) pp.114-128.
- 'A global history of science and religion' in Thomas Dixon et. al eds. Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives (University of Cambridge Press, 2010), pp.177-198.
- ''A Christian Benares': Orientalism, science and the Serampore Mission of Bengal' in Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 44, 2007, pp.111-145.
- 'Trading Knowledge: The East India Company's Elephants in India and Britain' in The Historical Journal, Vol. 48, 2005, pp. 27-63.
- 'Cosmopolitanism and Indigeneity in Four Violent Years: The Fall of the Kingdom of Kandy and the Great Rebellion Revisited’ in Sri Lanka at the Cross-Roads of History ed. by Alan Strathern and Zoltan Biederman, (London: UCL press, 2017), pp.194-215.
FORTHCOMING WORK
- ‘The Lived Persian Gulf in the Age of Revolutions’ in Kate Fullagar and Mike McDonnell eds. Facing Empire: Indigenous Peoples in the Age of Revolutions.
- ‘Materialities in the Making of World Histories: South Asia and the South Pacific’ in Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture: World Perspectives ed. by Ivan Gaskell and Sarah Carter, forthcoming.
