Team
Dr Mulaika Hijjas is Reader in South East Asian Studies at SOAS University of London, where she specialises in the Malay manuscript tradition but also teaches literature and cultural studies of the region. She has a BA in Literature from Harvard College; an MA in Islamic history from Oxford; and a PhD in Malay literature from SOAS. She held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship from 2009-14. She has published numerous articles and a monograph (Victorious Wives: The Disguised Heroine in Nineteenth-Century Malay Syair, NUS Press, 2010), and was co-managing editor of Indonesia and the Malay World. She is principal investigator on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project ‘Mapping Sumatra’s Manuscript Cultures’ (2022-2027). She can be reached at mh86@soas.ac.uk
Alan Darmawan is a postdoctoral researcher at SOAS University of London on the Mapping Sumatra’s Manuscript Cultures project. He obtained a PhD in Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia from Hamburg University, with a research grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Alan was also involved as a researcher in the ERC-funded project, Competing Regional Integration in Southeast Asia (CRISEA). He has convened panels, presented papers, and given talks at international conferences and workshops. Alan has published articles, book chapters, book reviews, and blogposts, and has made a documentary film. His research interests include heritage formation, Malay manuscript and performance traditions, as well as Islamic and royal revivals in Indonesia and the Malay world. Alan can be reached at: ad100@soas.ac.uk.
Zacky Umam was a postdoctoral researcher (2022-2023) in the Leverhulme-funded project “Mapping Sumatra’s Manuscript Cultures”, in particular the EAP329 which contains various private collections of manuscripts from Aceh. He completed his doctorate in history and Islamic studies at Freie Universitaet Berlin in the end 2021 and is currently a lecturer at Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia. His current research interests include the Islamic intellectual/manuscript tradition in Islamic Southeast Asia, 1600-1800.
