Rate My Professor Sujit Sivasundaram

Sujit Sivasundaram is Professor of World History in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Gonville and Caius College. Born and educated in Sri Lanka in Sinhala medium until 1992, he arrived at Cambridge in 1994, initially studying engineering before shifting to natural sciences and history and philosophy of science. He earned his BA in 1997, MPhil in 1998, and PhD in 2001 from the University of Cambridge. His academic career commenced as Research Fellow in History at Gonville and Caius College in 2001, followed by a lectureship there and at the London School of Economics in South Asian History from 2008 to 2010. Returning to Cambridge in 2010, he was appointed Professor of World History in 2019. He has directed the University's Centre of South Asian Studies, held visiting fellowships at institutions in Paris, Singapore, Munich, and Sydney, and served as Sackler Caird Fellow at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich from 2015 to 2017.

Sivasundaram's research centers on world history, particularly the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, integrating imperial history, history of science, environmental history, cultural history, history of race, and human-animal relations. Notable publications include Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (HarperCollins, 2020; University of Chicago Press, 2021), recipient of the British Academy Prize for Global Cultural Understanding in 2021 and the Jerry H. Bentley Prize in 2022; Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony (University of Chicago Press, 2013); Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Oceanic Histories, co-edited with David Armitage and Alison Bashford (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2012 and elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2023, alongside fellowships in the Royal Historical Society and Royal Asiatic Society. Sivasundaram supervises numerous MPhil and PhD students in world and imperial history, leading to successful academic careers for many. He heads the Faculty of History's EDI initiatives and directs the UKRI-funded COLOMBO: Layered Histories in a Global South City project from 2024 to 2029.