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.

Early life 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.

Sivasundaram was educated at S. Thomas' Preparatory School and the Colombo International School. He also has MPhil (1998) and PhD (2001) degrees from Cambridge. 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. Between 2015 and 2017 he was Sackler Caird Fellow at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. He was a fellow and council member of the Royal Historical Society (RHS). He delivered the 2019 RHS Prothero Lecture. He was co-editor of The Historical Journal and was associate editor of the Journal of British Studies.

He is a member of the Editorial Board for Past & Present. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2023.

Works 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; ) 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; ) Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony (2013, University of Chicago Press; 2014, Oxford University Press, Delhi; ) Oceanic Histories ed. with David Armitage and Alison Bashford (2017, Cambridge University Press; ) Waves Across the South (2020, HarperCollins) '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