Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Manimporok (Maro) Dotulong is Postdoctoral Fellow in International Humanities in Modern East Asia in the World in the Department of East Asian Studies and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. He received his DPhil in history from the University of Oxford. He specializes in multilingual archival research and the transnational history of larger insular Asia (Japan, Southeast Asia, and Australasia) and the Western Pacific. Focusing on questions of how nature shapes the course of history, his research explores competing modernities and the intellectual lives of ordinary nonstate actors, as well as topics ranging from indigeneity and local knowledge to environment and technological change. He is currently working on a book that covers the history of East- and Southeast Asian transnational connections born from the ocean. It is a project that examines how currents, winds, and marine biota shaped the life and times of ordinary seafolk — and focuses on the ways they carved out autonomous spaces and times for themselves in the interstices of 19th- and 20th-century empires. He is coeditor of a forthcoming volume offering new transnational approaches to the history of Japan’s global connectivity and is also involved in a dictionary project for the Tondanese language, a local language of North Sulawesi (Indonesia).