̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Sujit Sivasundaram

Cambridge academics elected 2023 British Academy Fellows

jek67 — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 11:30:28 +0000

Professor Jaideep Prabhu and Professor Sujit Sivasundaram join the latest cohort of Fellows which highlight the depth and breadth of the SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts for People and the Economy) disciplines and reflects the importance of interdisciplinary research.

Founded in 1902, ̽��ֱ��British Academy is the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. Each year, it elects to its fellowship up to 52 outstanding UK-based scholars who have achieved distinction in any branch of the humanities and social sciences.

Professor Jaideep Prabhu is a Professor of Marketing, the Jawaharlal Nehru Professor of Indian Business & Enterprise at the Judge Business School and Director of the Centre for India & Global Business. He is also a Fellow and Director of Studies at Clare College.

He said: “I am delighted to be joining such a distinguished group of academics, not only in my area of Management and Business Studies, but also across the Humanities and Social Sciences. I look forward to working with the other Fellows of the Academy on issues of importance to the UK and the world where the Humanities and Social Sciences have a crucial role to play. I owe a debt of gratitude to all those I have worked with over the years, and in particular my colleagues at Cambridge. This wouldn’t have been possible without them.”

Professor Sujit Sivasundaram is a Professor of World History and Fellow of Gonville & Caius College. He is currently working on the long history of Colombo as an exemplar of the global South city and also on an environmental history of the Indian Ocean. You can read a recent interview with Professor Sivasundaram in This Cambridge Life.

He said: “World history is about reaching for unexpected places to bring light to the human present and future. Research in this field is necessarily and fittingly collaborative and builds on the insights of librarians, curators, students and intellectuals, among others, in various places in the world. I thank all my friends, spread so far and wide, for pointing me to the right path in my research. This honour belongs to all of them.”

Welcoming the new Fellows, Professor Julia Black, President of the British Academy, said:

“It is with great pleasure that we welcome yet another outstanding cohort to the Academy’s Fellowship. ̽��ֱ��scope of research and expertise on display across our newly elected UK, Corresponding and Honorary Fellows shows the breadth and depth of knowledge and insight held by the British Academy. It is our role to harness this to understand and help shape a better world.”

Two academics from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have been elected Fellows of the British Academy as part of a new group of leading international humanities and social sciences researchers.

̽��ֱ��British Academy

̽��ֱ��British Academy building

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Four Cambridge researchers awarded European Research Council Advanced Grants

jg533 — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 09:43:20 +0000

̽��ֱ��European Research Council (ERC) has announced the award of 218 Advanced Grants to outstanding research leaders across Europe, as part of the Horizon Europe programme.

̽��ֱ��grants, totalling €544 million, support cutting-edge research in a wide range of fields from medicine and physics to social sciences and humanities.

̽��ֱ��ERC is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. ̽��ֱ��ERC Advanced Grant funding is amongst the most prestigious and competitive EU funding schemes, providing researchers with the opportunity to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs. Grants are awarded to established, leading researchers with a proven track record of significant research achievements over the past decade.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s grant awardees are:

Anna Korhonen, Professor of Natural Language Processing in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, for her project Towards Globally Equitable Language Technologies.

Richard Nickl, Professor of Mathematical Statistics in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, for his project Statistical aspects of non-linear inverse problems.

Peter Sewell, Professor of Computer Science at the Computer Laboratory, for his project Secure Foundations: Verified Systems Software Above Full-Scale Integrated Semantics.

Sujit Sivasundaram, Professor of World History at the Faculty of History, for his project Colombo: Layered Histories in the Global South City.

'Many many congratulations to Anna, Richard, Peter and Sujit on their success. It is fantastic to see the highly innovative work of our researchers being recognised in international competition in this way. We are once again reminded of the commitment of the ERC to cutting edge research across all disciplines and we continue to urge government to swiftly secure association to Horizon Europe,' said Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

"This funding puts our 218 research leaders, together with their teams of postdoctoral fellows, PhD students and research staff, in pole position to push back the boundaries of our knowledge, break new ground and build foundations for future growth and prosperity in Europe,” said Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth.

"These new ERC Advanced Grantees are a testament to the outstanding quality of research carried out across Europe. I am especially pleased to see such a high number of female researchers in this competition and that they are increasingly successful in securing funding. We look forward to seeing the results of the new projects in the years to come, with many likely to lead to breakthroughs and new advances,” said Maria Leptin, ERC President.

̽��ֱ��laureates of this grant competition will carry out their projects at universities and research centres in 20 countries in Europe, with the highest number of projects in Germany (37), the UK (35), France (32) and Spain (16). ̽��ֱ��winners come from all over the world, with 27 nationalities represented, notably Germans (36 researchers), French (32), Italians (21), British (19).

This call for proposals attracted nearly 1,650 applications, which were reviewed by panels of renowned researchers. ̽��ֱ��overall success rate was 13.2%. Female researchers account for 23% of all applications, their highest participation rate in Advanced Grant calls up to now.

In addition to strengthening Europe's knowledge base, the grants are expected to create more than 2,000 jobs for postdoctoral fellows, PhD students, and other staff at the host institutions. Past recipients have included Nobel laureates and other leading scientists who have gone on to make major contributions to their respective fields..

Adapted from a press release by the ERC.

̽��ֱ��funding will enable these researchers to explore their most innovative and ambitious ideas.

It is fantastic to see the highly innovative work of our researchers being recognised in international competition in this way.

Anne Ferguson-Smith

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̽��ֱ��historian gathering fragments of the past to understand how humans tick

cg605 — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 09:19:43 +0000

After he began studying at Cambridge, Sujit Sivasundaram, found the freedom to let his imagination and curiosity roam. Yet his interests and intellectual life continue to be shaped by the global South. Today, as Professor of World History, he is passionate about bringing the untold and forgotten stories from the past to life, so that we can understand the conditions and possibilities that frame human existence.

COVID-19 and the interspecies frontier

ta385 — Wed, 08 Jul 2020 11:30:00 +0000

Professor of World History, Sujit Sivasundaram, discusses how our long history with pangolins reveals the preconditions of both the pandemic and environmental crisis.

A world of science

lw355 — Thu, 08 Oct 2015 09:20:44 +0000

̽��ֱ��year was 1789; the place Bengal. Isaac Newton’s masterpiece Principia Mathematica was being translated for only the third time in its already 100-year-old history; this time, into Arabic.

̽��ֱ��author of this remarkable feat of scholarship was Tafazzul Husain Khan. According to a member of the ruling East India Company: “Khan… by translating the works of the immortal Newton, has conducted those imbued with Arabick literature to the fountain of all physical and astronomical knowledge.”

For Professor Simon Schaffer, who has researched the story of Tafazzul’s achievements, the complex work of translation is deeply significant. Tafazzul worked with scholars in English, Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit language communities in his efforts to connect Newtonian theories with the Indo-Persian intellectual tradition. For Tafazzul was, as Schaffer describes, “a go-between”.

“ ̽��ֱ��‘go-betweens’ are the individuals who, across the centuries, have been the cogs that have kept science moving,” he explains. “They are the knowledge brokers and translators, networkers and messengers – the original ‘knowledge transfer facilitators’. Their role may have disappeared from mainstream histories of science, but their tradecraft has been indispensable to the globalisation of science.”

Schaffer and Dr Sujit Sivasundaram are historians of science with an interest in understanding how the seeds of scientific knowledge have spread and grown. They believe that the global history of science is really the history of shifts and reinventions of a variety of ways of doing science across the world.

They, and others, have called for a retelling of science’s past, not only to be more “culturally symmetric” but also because the issue has enormous contemporary relevance.

“A standard tale is that modern science spread around the world from Western Europe, starting about 500 years ago based on the work of those such as Newton, Copernicus and Galileo, and then Darwin, Einstein, and so on,” explains Schaffer. “But this narrative about the globalisation of science just doesn’t work at all. It ignores a remarkable process of knowledge exchange that happened between the East and West for centuries.”

“Successful science is seen to be universal in its applicability,” adds Sivasundaram. “Yet, accounts of scientific discovery, heroism and priority have been part and parcel of a political narrative of competitive ownership by empires, nations and civilisations. To tease this story apart, we focus on the exchanges and ‘silencings’ across political configurations that are central to the rise of science on the global stage.”

Over the past two years, with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, he and Schaffer have undertaken a programme of debates to ask whether a transregional rather than a Eurocentric history of science could now be told.

To do so, they teamed up with researchers in India and Africa, including Professor Irfan Habib from Delhi’s National ̽��ֱ�� of Educational Planning and Administration and Professor Dhruv Raina of Jawarhalal Nehru ̽��ֱ��, and in December 2014 held an international workshop at the Nehru Memorial Library in New Delhi. “And now our debate is also being carried forward by a new generation of early-career researchers who came to the workshop,” adds Sivasundaram.

One conundrum the researchers debated was how global narratives of science could have been missed by scholars for so long. It largely stems from the use of source materials says Schaffer: “It’s an archival problem: as far as the production and preservation of sources is concerned, those connected with Europe far outweigh those from other parts of the world.”

“If we are to de-centre from Europe, we need to use radically new kinds of sources – monuments, sailing charts, courtly narratives, and so on,” explains Sivasundaram. He gives an example of Sri Lankan palm-leaf manuscripts: “ ̽��ֱ��Mahavamsais a Buddhist chronicle of the history of Sri Lanka spanning 25 centuries. Among the deeds of the last kings of Kandy, I noticed seemingly inconsequential references to temple gardens. This led me back to the colonial archive documenting the creation of a botanic garden in 1821, and I realised that the British had ‘recycled’ a Kandyan tradition of gardening, by building their colonial garden on the site of a temple garden.”

Moreover, says Sivasundaram, the mechanisms of knowledge assimilation are often overlooked. Europeans often accumulated knowledge in India by engaging with pandits, or learned men. “ ̽��ֱ��Europeans did not have a monopoly over the combination of science and empire – the pioneering work of Chris Bayly [see panel] shows how they fought to take over information networks and scientific patronage systems that were already in place. For Europeans to practice astronomy in India, for instance, it meant translating Sanskrit texts and engaging with pandits.”

“Very often, scientific achievement is used as a standard to measure a country’s progress because science and technology can intervene in problems of hunger, disease and development,” adds Sivasundaram. “If a biased history of science is told, then the past can become what Irfan Habib has called a ‘battlefield’, instead of a ‘springboard’ for future research or indeed for conversation across cultures.”

This is why, says Schaffer, it becomes so important to provide a better account of the worldly interaction between the kinds of knowledge communicated, the agents of communication – like Tafazzul Husain Khan – and the paths they travelled.

̽��ֱ��history of science has been centred for too long on the West, say Simon Schaffer and Sujit Sivasundaram. It’s time to think global.

̽��ֱ��‘go-betweens’ have been the cogs that have kept science moving ... their tradecraft has been indispensable to the globalisation of science

Simon Schaffer

Private collection/Bridgeman Images

̽��ֱ��European in India, 1813 by Charles D'Oyly (1781-1845)

̽��ֱ��art of listening in

Knowledge networks were as important to the building of British political intelligence in north India in the 18th and 19th centuries as they were to the diffusion of science.

No discussion of Indian history, or of the communication and the movement of knowledge, would be complete without reference to the work of the late Professor Sir Christopher Bayly (1945–2015).

Bayly saw the role of Indian spies, runners and knowledgeable secretaries as crucial to the British in helping to keep information and gossip flowing in the 1780s and 1860s. His ground-breaking research uncovered the social and intellectual origins of these informants, and showed how networks of ‘go-betweens’ helped the British understand India’s politics, economic activities and culture.

“One overriding reason why the East India Company was able to conquer India… was that the British had learnt the art of listening in on the internal communications of Indian polity and society,” he explained in his seminal work Empire and Information (1996).

Ultimately, however, India’s complex systems of debate and communication challenged the political and intellectual dominance of the British; it was their misunderstanding of the subtleties of Indian politics and values, he argues, that contributed to the British failure to anticipate the 1857 Mutiny–Rebellion.

World-renowned for his enormous contributions to his subject, Bayly was the Director of Cambridge’s Centre of South Asian Studies until his retirement in 2014, as well as President of St Catharine’s College, and the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History in the Faculty of History.

He completely transformed people’s understanding of India in the 18th and 19th centuries, explains Professor Joya Chatterji, the Centre’s current Director: “Chris has been one of the most influential figures in the field of modern Indian history. Every one of his monographs broke new ground, whether in political, social and economic, or latterly intellectual history.”

His work was increasingly drawn towards ‘world historical’ comparisons and connections; his ̽��ֱ��Birth of the Modern World (2004) transformed the understanding of the history of modernity itself, drawing attention to its richly complex, overlapping global roots.

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