Joshua Gedacht
Rowan University
Dr. Gedacht has served the past five years as Visiting Assistant Professor at Rowan University in New Jersey. Before arriving at Rowan, he received his B.A. from McGill University in Canada and his Ph.D. in Southeast Asian history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also worked for several years in Asia as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and as an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. His research examines colonial-era war-making, Muslim networks, and the reconfiguration of religious connections extending from Southeast Asia through the Indian Ocean world and onward to the Middle East. His current book project, Coercive Cosmopolitanism: War and Islam in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1800-1940, considers the ways in which imperial conquest engendered paradoxical dynamics of exclusion and inclusion, disconnection, and reconnection. He also has published widely on the relationship between colonial violence and trans-regional Islamic networks, including a co-edited book titled Challenging Cosmopolitanism: Coercion, Mobility, and Displacement in Islamic Asia (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), peer-reviewed journal articles, and entries in the Muslim World, Itinerario, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, as well as numerous book chapters. At Rowan University, Dr. Gedacht’s teaching spans across global history to include courses in the fields of South and Southeast Asia, Islam in Asia, and the Middle East.