I was born in Papua New Guinea and spent my childhood in Cambridge, Australia and Manchester, where I attended a comprehensive school, before arriving as an undergraduate at Oxford to do Ancient and Modern History. After a Masters in History and Anthropology at UCL, I returned to Oxford to do my doctorate in sixteenth century Sri Lankan history, completed in 2002, and then held research fellowships and college lectureships in Cambridge before returning one last time to Oxford in 2011. I have been a Fellow and Tutor in History (and a lecturer at St. John’s college) since that time. I retain an interest in Sri Lankan history but for some time my research has pursued global comparative questions ranging widely across different times and places.

I teach global early modern history, and the history of early modern Europe, together with a variety of more general papers.

Much of my undergraduate teaching is for an Asia-centric global history paper, ‘Eurasian Empires 1450-1800’, which looks at the world dominated by great non-European Empires, from the Mughals to Japan. I also teach at Prelims an Early Modern European paper, Approaches to History (Sociology, Anthropology), Disciplines of History, and an Optional Subject in the Spanish encounter with the New World.

At Graduate level I teach on the Global and Imperial History core course and an Option paper on Dawn of the Global World.

My most recent publication Converting Rulers: Global Patterns 1450-1850 (Cambridge, 2024), helps explain the religious map of the world by analysing why rulers in some regions converted to Christianity and others did not. Its main case studies are Kongo, Japan, Thailand and Hawaii, but it also ranges more widely. This is a companion volume to a theoretical book about how the relationship between religion and politics that draws examples from all of world history: Unearthly Powers: Religious and Political Change in World History (2019). In recent years, then, my work has pursued a global comparative methodology, seeking to find rigorous ways of addressing ‘the big picture’. This also entails engagement with anthropology and sociology, as is reflected in an interdisciplinary volume of essays, co-edited with Azfar Moin, Sacred Kingship in World History: Between Immanence and Transcendence (Columbia University Press, 2022).

However, I initially specialized in the history of Sri Lanka c.1500-1650, which is when the island came under the influence of Portuguese imperialism, and Catholicism and Theravada Buddhism met for the first time. This resulted in a monograph, Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth Century Sri Lanka: Portuguese Imperialism in a Buddhist Land (Cambridge 2007), a co-edited a book with Zoltan Biedermann, Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History (UCL Press, 2017 – available for free here), and articles on such themes as origin myths, source criticism, and the development of ethnic consciousness. as origin myths, ethnic consciousness, and sacred kingship.

I am currently interested in the long-term history of secularisation and my next project will be an examination of the way in which the great states of Asia sought to subjugate and harness the religious sphere in the early modern period, 1400-1800.

https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-alan-strathern

https://newbooksnetwork.com/converting-rulers

https://newbooksnetwork.com/sacred-kingship-in-world-history

https://theglobalhistorypodcast.com/2019/03/05/episode-1-alan-strathern/