People

Dr Sumit Mandal commenced his appointment as the Muhammad Alagil Chair in Arabia Asia Studies with the Inter-Asia Engagements Cluster with effect from 2 July 2024.

Dr Mandal graduated with a PhD in History from Columbia University in 1994. He is a transregional historian who researches the outcome of longstanding inter-cultural and inter-religious interaction in the Malay World — understood as a flexible and expansive cultural geography. His current research explores keramat (Muslim shrines) in the Indian Ocean as the built archives of a little-known past enmeshed in individual acts of intellectual and political leadership, inter-cultural interaction, transregional connections, piety, and miracles. This research has taken him to Java, Sumatra, Singapore, the Malay Peninsula, and Cape Peninsula (South Africa).