This episode features a conversation with four colleagues involved in the International Consortium for Indian Ocean Studies (ICIOS). Mahmood Kooria is Lecturer in the History of the Indian Ocean World at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests are in the premodern Indian Ocean world, global history of law, Islamic cultures, matrilineal-matriarchal communities, Afro-Asian connections, and manuscript traditions. He is the author of the book Islamic Law in Circulation, published by Cambridge University Press in 2024. Tom Hoogervorst is a professor at KITLV. His research explores human connections and cultural contact through food and language. His doctoral work traced Southeast Asian influence on the early Indian Ocean world through loanwords and linguistic borrowing. His most recent book is Language Ungoverned: Indonesia's Chinese Print Entrepreneurs, 1911–1949, published in 2021 by Cornell University Press. In 2024, he launched a project on the culinary influence of early communities with roots in the Indonesian archipelago in Sri Lanka, South Africa, and Suriname. Ariel C. Lopez is Associate Professor and Assistant to the Dean for Research, Publications, and Information at the Asian Center, University of the Philippines, Diliman. His areas of interest include Indonesian Studies, Colonial and Maritime History, Philippine History and Southeast Asian History. He is the author of the book Philippine Confluence: Iberian, Chinese and Islamic Currents, C. 1500-1800, published by Leiden University Press in 2020. Finally, Aireen Grace Andal is a researcher at the Airlangga Institute for Indian Ocean Crossroads, Airlangga University, and she is currently a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies. She is a cultural geographer whose work focuses especially on children’s experiences of – and engagements with – cities, and she also researches island geographies and peripheral urban transformations. The primary focus of discussion is the newly relaunched International Consortium for Indian Ocean Studies, which builds upon earlier initiatives started in Leiden nearly a decade ago. In introducing the new consortium, the guests also discuss the importance of collaborative, multi-centered, and multi-vocal approaches to research, and they reflect on how an Indian Ocean perspective can disrupt and unsettle the traditional cartographies inherited from earlier area studies divisions.
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