Princeton University

My current book project, The Makings of Indonesian Islam, looks at the results of an engagement between Islamic reformers with intellectual links to Cairo and influential colonial scholars, arguing that they set the parameters for the ways in which Islam has been, and still is, imagined in specific ways in both Southeast Asia and the Academy. It might be longer than the last one, but the pictures should be nice. I also have in mind two other projects. One will be on the history of Islam at the Cape of Good Hope, while the other will be on the history of Archaeology in Southeast Asia.

I study the history of Southeast Asia, focusing at present on Islam, nationalism, Dutch colonialism and orientalism. I earned my B.A. in Asian Studies (Arabic) at the Australian National University in Canberra (1995) and got my Ph.D. in Southeast Asian History from the University of Sydney (2001). I came to Princeton in 2005 from a postdoctoral fellowship at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, the Netherlands. In my first book, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma Below the Winds (2003), I argued that Islam played a central and largely unacknowledged role in the Indonesian nationalist movement, which historians have tended to associate mainly with a secular, Dutch-educated elite.

I teach a survey course on the history of Southeast Asia, a methods class framed around the Indian Ocean as a venue, and a graduate seminar titled "Southeast Asian Islams".