Professor Alan Strathern

Position

Tutorial Fellow in History

Qualifications

BA, MA, DPhil (Oxon.)
MA (London)

Academic Positions

Professor of Global History

Tutor and Fellow in History at Brasenose, and Lecturer at St. John's.

Academic Background and Previous Positions

I studied Ancient and Modern History at Oxford (1996), and then History and Anthropology at University College London before returning to Oxford for my DPhil in History (2002). I then moved to Cambridge, first to a Research Fellowship at Clare Hall, and then in 2008 to a College Lectureship at Churchill and Murray Edwards College. I joined Brasenose and St. John's in 2011.

Undergraduate Teaching Areas

Early Modern Asian, European and global history

Graduate Teaching Areas

I welcome research students in early modern world history, particularly cultural and religious encounters in Asia, and in Sri Lankan history.

Research Interests

My most recent publication Converting Rulers: Global Patterns 1450-1850, helps explain the religious map of the world by analysing why rulers in some regions converted to Christianity and others did not. This is a companion volume to a theoretical book about religion and politics that draws examples from all of world history (Unearthly Powers – see below). 

I initially specialized in the history of Sri Lanka c.1500-1650, which is when the island came under the influence of Portuguese imperialism. My work has increasingly adopted a more comparative and inter-disciplinary approach drawing on anthropology and historical sociology, and addressing such themes as origin myths, ethnic consciousness, and sacred kingship.

Publications

See Faculty page below, for full list.

Converting Rulers: Global Patterns 1450-1850 (Cambridge, 2024).

Sacred Kingship in World History: Between Immanence and Transcendence, ed. With Azfar Moin (Columbia 2022)
Sacred Kingship in World History | Columbia University Press

Unearthly Powers: Religious and Political Change in World History (Cambridge 2019)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/unearthlypowers/2A53B703811A4344B65CF37CC9C6E143

Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History, ed. Zoltán Biedermann and Alan Strathern (UCL Press, 2017)

Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Sri Lanka: Portuguese Imperialism in a Buddhist Land (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Global Early Modernity and the Problem of What Came Before, Past & Present, Volume 238, Issue suppl_13, 1 November 2018, Pages 317–344
‘Religion and Empire’, Encyclopedia of Empire, ed. John MacKenzie (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).

‘The Vijaya Origin Myth of Sri Lanka and the Strangeness of Kingship', Past and Present 203 (May 2009), 3-28.

E-mail

[email protected]

Links

Faculty of History - Alan Strathern