Brasenose College, Oxford - Dr Alan Strathern
Dr Alan Strathern
Name and Title
Dr Alan Strathern
BNC Status
Fellow
Qualifications
BA, MA, DPhil (Oxon.)
MA (London)
Academic Positions
University Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow in Modern History at Brasenose, and Lecturer at St. John's.
I will be on research leave in 2011-2013 following the award of a Leverhulme Prize in 2010.
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 world and European 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
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 or inter-disciplinary approach, and addressed such themes as origin myths, ethnic consciousness, and sacred kingship. I'm currently involved in a project to examine the notion of a global early modernity, and am working on a comparative analysis of elite conversions to monotheism across the world 1450-1850.
Publications
Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Sri Lanka: Portuguese Imperialism in a Buddhist Land (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
‘The Vijaya Origin Myth of Sri Lanka and the Strangeness of Kingship', Past and Present 203 (May 2009), 3-28.
‘Sri Lanka in the Long Early Modern Period: Its Place in a Comparative Theory of Second Millennium Eurasian History' in Modern Asian Studies 43, Part 4 (July
2009), 809-864.
‘Transcendentalist Intransigence: Why Rulers Rejected Monotheism in Early Modern Southeast Asia and Beyond', in Comparative Studies in Society and History, April 2007, Vol. 49, no. 2, 358-83.
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