Professor Sujit Sivasundaram

My new book Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire is an experiment in critically repopulating a long-standing label of Euro-Atlantic historiography, 'the age of revolutions', from the global oceanic South. It moves across a series of small seas in the Indian and Pacific oceans from c.1790 to c.1850, arguing that in these sites the age of revolutions was about Indigenous presence, conflict, assertion, resistance and organisation followed by counter-revolutionary British imperialism. It also centres small islands which have often been marginalised in broader narratives of world history.

I am completing a book on the long history of the Indian Ocean, which works with environmental fragments and elements. At focus are various materials which open human past and presents and also humans' sensory and symbolic associations around nature which are one ingredient, I argue, in the making of broader structures such as capitalism, imperialism, enlightenment or exploitation. Among the travels in view are those of: fossilised fern, cowrie shell, coir rope, glass beads, double coconuts, metals, elephant ivory, ambergris, sea cucumber, pepper, palm-leaf manuscript, pearls, smallpox, sea sand, volcanic ash, monsoon winds, fossil fuel, and plastic particles. The argument highlights the unexpectedly contingent and twisted histories of the human-environment relation in the ocean. It builds a story, out of many scraps, specimens and species, from often passable, invisible and minute objects; this story is neither universal nor teleological. The book ends with the human and its fragmentation, as also human detritus in the contemporary Indian Ocean.

After initial work on elephants in South Asia, I continue to work on histories of the human and the animal and one recent short think piece sought to provide a longer chronology of the inter-related histories of the covid-19 pandemic and the environmental crisis. This piece, 'The Animal, Human and the Prehistory of Covid-19', tracks this inter-relation by thinking with the pangolin. Relatedly, I also am interested in the future direction of world history and am writing on how to conceive of it in more materialist terms. This picks up on my recent piece, 'Materialities in the Making of World Histories' and will lead into a couple of papers on using environmental objects to organise world histories and also what a less 'global' and more 'Earthy' historiography might look like. It also represents an outworking of my writing in the history of science. 

Though I grew up in war-time Sri Lanka, I was not physically affected by the conflict. I was born into a family which crossed the ethnic divides of the island and the national territories of Sri Lanka and India. For this reason, I was educated strictly in the 'Sinhala medium' until 1992. My Sri Lankan heritage has undoubtedly affected the broader research questions that I interrogate in my work. I have just launched a collaborative research project on the long urban history of the city of Colombo as a reflection on the pasts and futures of the global south city. This project was successful in the ERC Advanced Grant pathway and will run for five years, with three postdocs and two doctoral studentships and with work across academic and public histories as well as art, visual studies and historiography.

I supervise MPhil and PhD students working in the broad field of world and imperial history and am especially interested in transregional projects. I have supervised over twenty doctoral candidates in topics ranging from gender and factory labour in Ottoman Bursa and British Bombay in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the history of the Philippines in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and from, Indo-Central Asian trade in the early modern era, and the intellectual history of Islam in the Indian ocean, to the history of language policy in twentieth-century Sri Lanka. Former students have taken up academic posts in various universities, including Edinburgh, Warwick and Kings College London in the UK and also in Germany, Portugal, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and the US; they have also entered public service posts. They have won a string of major national, international and University prizes for their work. 

I am sorry to say that I have a full panel of PhD students right now, including two of three new PhDs beginning in 2024 from external funding, and cannot accept any new PhD students for entry in 2025.

I co-convene, lecture and supervise on the 1A paper on the global eighteenth century (together with Melissa Calaresu, Renaud Morieux and Emma Spary) and the 1B paper on British worlds in the long nineteenth century (with Peter Mandler and Mike Joseph).

I will soon complete my term as President of The Pacific Circle, a scholarly society for research on the history of knowledge in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Series co-editor for CUP's  'Cambridge Oceanic Histories' series (with Alison Bashford and David Armitage); series co-editor for Palgrave Macmillan's 'World Environmental History' series (with Vinita Damodaran, Rohan D'Souza, James Beattie). On the editorial board for Manchester University Press' long-established 'Studies in Imperialism' series. 

Syndic, Fitzwilliam Museum.

On the editorial boards of Past and Present; History Australia; Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies and other journals. Have served as Associate Editor of Journal of British Studies. 

Was co-editor of The Historical Journal over a four year term and continue to serve on the editorial board.

I was one of the authors of the RHS report and resource on racial and ethnic inequality in the UK drawing on a survey that generated in excess of 700 responses from historians across the UK and co-chaired the working group which produced the report. I also served on the Royal Historical Society Council. As of 2024, I lead the EDI work at the Faculty of History.