Manimporok

Maani 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 the temporality and spatiality of competing modernities, the intellectual history of ordinary people, and topics such as indigeneity, local knowledge, 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 for themselves in the interstices of 19th- and 20th-century empires. He is also co-editing a volume offering new transnational approaches to the study of the “Opening of Japan” and is involved in a dictionary project for the Tondanese language, a local language of North Sulawesi (Indonesia).

Publications:

Manimporok Dotulong, "Hyakushō in the Arafura Zone: Ecologizing the Nineteenth-Century ‘Opening of Japan’", Past and Present (20 January 2022), https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab038.