Sujit Sivasundaram

Sujit Sivasundaram is a British Sri Lankan historian and academic. He is currently professor of world history at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge.

Sivasundaram was born in Sri Lanka. He is the great grand son of Lawrie Muthu Krishna, editor of the Ceylonese newspaper and founder of The Polytechnic vocational school. He is the grandson of Mano Muthu Krishna-Candappa, journalist and advocate for women's advancement in Sri Lanka. The Muthukrishnas were a leading family amongst Colombo's Chetty community.

Sivasundaram was educated at S. Thomas' Preparatory School (in the Sinhala medium) and Colombo International School. Sivasundaram says he hated studying history at school given how it was taught as social studies. After school he joined the University of Cambridge on a scholarship in 1994 to study engineering but later switched to history and graduated in 1997 with a BA degree. He also has MPhil (1998) and PhD (2001) degrees from Cambridge.

Sivasundaram joined Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 2001 as a research fellow before becoming a lecturer. He has been a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and a visiting senior research fellow at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore and the University of Sydney. He taught south Asian and imperial history at the London School of Economics between 2008 and 2010. Between 2015 and 2017 he was Sackler Caird Fellow at the National Maritime Museum. He was director of the Centre for South Asian Studies, Cambridge and director of graduate studies at the Faculty of History, Cambridge. He is currently a fellow and professor of world history at Gonville and Caius College. He supervises MPhil and PhD students of world and imperial history.

Sivasundaram was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for medieval, early modern and modern history in 2012. He is a fellow and council member of the Royal Historical Society (RHS). He delivered the 2019 RHS Prothero Lecture. He is co-editor of The Historical Journal and was associate editor of the Journal of British Studies. He is on the editorial boards of History Australia, The International History Review and Medical History.

Sivasundaram has written numerous books and articles including:

• Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795-1850 (2005, Cambridge University Press; ISBN 9780521188883, 0521188881, 9780521848367, 0521848369)
• Science, Race and Imperialism ed. with Marwa Elshakry in Victorian Science and Literature, Vol 6, eds. Bernard Lightman and Gowan Dawson (2012, Pickering & Chatto Publishers; ISBN 9781848930926, 1848930925)
• Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony (2013, University of Chicago Press; 2014, Oxford University Press, Delhi; ISBN 9780198096245, 0198096240)
• Oceanic Histories ed. with David Armitage and Alison Bashford (2017, Cambridge University Press; ISBN 9781108423182, 1108423183, 9781108434829, 1108434827)
• Waves Across the South (2020, Harper Collins)
• 'Materialities in the Making of World Histories: South Asia and the South Pacific' in Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture: World Perspectives ed. by Ivan Gaskell and Sarah Carter