Leverhulme Research Leadership Award PhD studentship

The studentship is offered as part of the Leverhulme Research Leadership Award ‘Mapping Sumatra’s manuscript cultures.’ This project focuses on three case studies: the Palembang royal library, looted by the British in 1812 and by the Dutch in 1821, and dispersed across institutional collections in several countries; the libraries of religious schools in the Minangkabau highlands digitised by the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP 144); and personal libraries from Aceh, again digitised by the EAP (EAP 329). Using archives assembled by colonial-era collecting and those that remain in situ in Sumatra, the project aims to produce a ground-breaking, holistic and contextualised understanding of the writing and intellectual traditions of Islamic South East Asia in the 18th and 19th centuries. It will look at the surviving manuscripts not solely as individual texts but as books embedded in libraries, part of a specific social and intellectual context. It also aims to consider Islamic manuscripts, predominantly in Arabic, alongside literary manuscripts, predominantly in vernacular South East Asian languages such as Malay, Javanese and Acehnese, as part of a shared writing culture.

Applications are due by July 9, 2021. Click here for more information.