Office: 1.2, 26/27 St. Michael's Park

Phone: +44 (0)117 928 7912

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @sulinlewis

I specialise in twentieth-century history, with a geographical focus in Southeast Asia (especially Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia) and broader pan-Asian, pan-African, and global connections.  I have research interests in urban history, civil society and activist networks, gender, migration, decolonisation, and development.

My first monograph, Cities in Motion: urban life and cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia 1920-1940 (2016) moved away from a nation-based and ethnic nationalist reading of colonial-era Southeast Asia by examining the cosmopolitan port-city as a site of experimentation and cross-cultural interaction in the built environment, civic associations, print media, education, and popular culture, with a focus on Penang, Rangoon, and Bangkok.  It won the Urban History Association Prize for Best Book (Non-North America, 2015-2016).

I was the PI on a collaborative research project on Afro-Asian Networks in the Early Cold War funded by the AHRC (co-led with Carolien Stolte, Leiden). The project examined the broad participation of activists, socialists, artists, and writers in the Afro-Asian solidarity movements of the broader Bandung era. We pioneered an innovative collaborative research methodology that encouraged scholarly collaboration from the point of archival inquiry to the writing-up process. We also produced an edited collection, The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism (Leiden University, 2022). 

I am currently working on a book on transnational histories of socialism in decolonising Southeast Asia. As part of an AHRC-funded project on socialist internationalism, I also co-edited a volume on Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World: Envisioning Modernity in the Era of Decolonisation with Nana Osei-Opare (now out with Bloomsbury).

I am a member of the editorial board of Past and Present.

Biography

I completed my MA at the School of Oriental and African Studies and my PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2010. I was a Past and Present Post-Doctoral Fellow at the IHR (2010-2011) and Mellon post-doctoral fellow at the University of California Berkeley (2011-2013). I was Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Birmingham from 2013-2014. 

Between degrees, I worked on and managed community-driven development projects for the World Bank and International Organization for Migration in Indonesia, where I developed an interest in the history of local civil society organizations and grassroots social movements in Southeast Asia. 

Research Supervision

I would be interested in supervising students who wish to work on any topic relating to my research interests. I welcome proposals relating to global/transnational connections in Asia and the political, social, intellectual, and cultural history of Southeast Asia between c. 1800 and the present and international histories of decolonisation and the Left. 

I have supervised/am currently supervising or co-supervising research students working on Indonesian contributions to Afro-Asian networks, punk in Singapore, multiracial communities in Hong Kong, the emergence of the suit in post-war Hong Kong; Chinese students in 1920s Paris, and post-war rehabilitation and humanitarianism in China.

Teaching

I have designed and taught courses on Colonial Radicals, Modern Girls and New Women, Decolonization, Global Cities, the History of Modern Southeast Asia, and on Global Development.  I am the unit convenor for a team-taught unit on Asia in Global Perspective.