Peter Borschberg teaches history at the National University of Singapore. He specializes in Europe-Asian interactions in the early-modern period, mainly with a geographic focus on Southeast Asia. He is the author of several studies including The Singapore and Melaka Straits: Violence, Security and Diplomacy in the Seventeenth Century (2011), as well as Hugo Grotius, the Portuguese and Free Trade in the East Indies (2012).
Anthony Rendell Disney, MA (Oxon.), PhD (Harvard), is primarily a historian of the Portuguese empire in maritime Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, about which he has written extensively. His works include Twilight of the Pepper Empire: Portuguese Trade in Southwest India in the Early Seventeenth Century (1978; 2nd edn 2010); A History of Portugal and of the Portuguese Empire: From Beginnings to 1807 (two volumes, 2009); The Portuguese in India and Other Studies, 1500–1700 (2009); and numerous articles, papers, and other shorter works. He has taught at Melbourne and La Trobe Universities in Australia and has been a scholar emeritus at La Trobe since 2010. Anthony has also been a member of the International Seminar on Indo-Portuguese History since its foundation in 1978. Currently he is writing a biography of Dom Miguel de Noronha, fourth Count of Linhares, who was viceroy at Goa between 1629 and 1635.
Jack Fairey’s research work deals primarily with the history of the Mediterranean and Eastern Orthodox Christendom, with a particular interest in empires, religion, and diplomacy. He was Ted & Elaine Athanassiades Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton in 2005–2006, and has previously taught European, Ottoman, and Mediterranean history at the National University of Singapore, and before that at Queens University and York University in Canada. He is the coeditor of Volume One of Empire in Asia. His most recent publication, The Great Powers and Orthodox Christendom: The Crisis over the Eastern Church in the Era of the Crimean War (2015), examines the role of the Orthodox Church as a locus for competing imperial agendas in the mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. The monograph shows how competition among the British, Russian, French, Austrian, and Ottoman governments over religious protectorates and clerical privileges contributed first to the outbreak of the Crimean War (1853–56) and then to secularizing reforms in the Ottoman Empire. His other publications have dealt with the impact of religion and imperial ideologies on group identity in the Balkans, as well as with the intersections of British, French, Russian, Austrian, and Ottoman imperialism in the eastern Mediterranean.
Brian P. Farrell is professor of history at the National University of Singapore, where he has been teaching since 1993. His research and teaching interests focus on the military history of the British Empire, the Western military experience in Asia, and the modern history of Empire in Asia. He is the author of The Defence and Fall of Singapore 1940–1942 (2005) and The Basis and Making of British Grand Strategy 1940–1943: Was There a Plan? (1998), and coauthor of Between Two Oceans: A Military History of Singapore from 1275–1971 (1999; 2010), plus related edited books, chapters in books, and journal articles. Series editor for Empire in Asia, and coeditor for Volumes One and Two, he is currently working on a coauthored study of Great Powers and the geopolitical reordering of the Asia Pacific in the twentieth century.
Florence Hodous is currently a postdoctoral scholar at Renmin University, Beijing, interested in the history of the Mongol Empire and in particular its laws and religions, as well as cross-cultural contacts between Yuan China and the Ilkhanate in Persia. From 2013 to 2016, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, researching judges of the Mongol Empire. Her publications include: “A Judge at the Crossroads of Cultures: Shi Tianlin” (Asiatische Studien, forthcoming); “Faith and the Law: Religious Beliefs and the Death Penalty in the Ilkhanate” (in Bruno De Nicola ed., The Mongols’ Middle East, BRILL, 2016); “Clash or Compromise? Mongol and Muslim Law in the Ilkhanate (1258–1335)” (Studies on the Iranian World II, Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2015); and “The quriltai as a Legal Institution in the Mongol Empire” (Central Asiatic Journal 56, 2012/2013). She completed her PhD, “Toluid Dynamics of Asia: Flexibility, Legality and Identity within Toluid Institutions,” in 2013 from SOAS, University of London, under the direction of George Lane.
Murari Kumar Jha is currently an assistant professor in the School of Historical Studies, Nalanda University, India. Earlier, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of History, National University of Singapore. He received training in history at Leiden University, the Netherlands, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His forthcoming monograph deals with the Ganga River, the Mughal Empire’s successes and failures along the river, and the interactions between the regional economy along the eastern tracks of the Ganga and the maritime global economy of the Bay of Bengal during 1500–1800 ce.
Sher Banu Khan is an assistant professor in the Malay Studies Department at the National University of Singapore. She received her advanced master’s degree from Leiden University and her PhD from Queen Mary, University of London. Her research interest is the Malay world and Southeast Asia in general in the early-modern period focusing on state-formation, cross-cultural encounters, gender studies, and Islam. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters, among which are “Ties That Unbind: The Botched Aceh-VOC Alliance for the Conquest of Melaka 1640–1641” (Indonesia and the Malay World); “What Happened to Syaiful Rijal?” (Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde); “Men of Prowess and Women of Piety: The Rule of Sultanah Safiatuddin Syah of Aceh 1641–1675” (Journal of Southeast Asian Studies); and “The Jewel Affair: The Sultanah, Her Orangkaya and the Dutch Foreign Envoys” (M. Feener, P. Daly, and A. Reid, eds, Mapping the Acehnese Past). Her latest book is titled Sovereign Women in a Muslim Kingdom: The Sultanahs of Aceh, 1641–1699 (2017).
Bruce M. Lockhart is associate professor in the History Department at the National University of Singapore. He trained at Cornell University in Southeast Asian history, and his specialization includes both Thailand and Indochina. His primary interest has always been the monarchy, and he has written a monograph on The End of the Vietnamese Monarchy (Yale Council on Southeast Asian Studies, 1993). Currently, he is working on a history of constitutional monarchy in Thailand. He has coauthored the third edition of the Historical Dictionary of Vietnam in the Scarecrow Press series and coedited The Cham of Vietnam: History, Society and Art (2011). He has also written several journal articles and book chapters on Vietnamese and Lao historiography. As a follow-up to his contribution to this volume, he hopes to look more deeply at French relations with Siam and Cambodia during the reign of King Mongkut (1851–68).
Frederik Vermote is an assistant professor in Asian and World History at Fresno State University and a research fellow at the USF Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History. His research interests include Jesuit finances and travel between Europe and China during the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. His forthcoming and most recent publications include: “Travellers Lost and Redirected: Jesuit Networks and the Limits of European Exploration in Asia” (Itinerario: The Journal of the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction); two book chapters on financing Jesuit missions in Brill and Oxford edited volumes; “Cash or Credit: Jesuit Money Flows during the Dawn of a Global World” (Mercantilism and Account Keeping: Comparative Analysis of the Periphery-Core Structure and Its Impacts on Indigenous Market Players); and an article titled “Dangers and Limitations of Jesuit Travel throughout Eurasia during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries” (The World History Connected). Vermote’s book manuscript Moving Money and Missionaries in a Global World: The Jesuit Financial Networks between Europe and Asia is under contract with Brill.
Jinping Wang is assistant professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore. She works on the sociocultural history of middle and late imperial China. She is the author of the forthcoming monograph In the Wake of the Mongols: The Making of a New Social Order in North China, 1200–1600, which will be published by Harvard University Asia Center.
Paul W. Werth is professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, specializing in the history of the Russian Empire. He has held fellowships in Washington, North Carolina, Sapporo, and Munich, and for five years he was editor of the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. His previous work has focused primarily on problems of religious diversity and toleration in Tsarist Russia, and his major publications include At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia’s Volga- Kama Region, 1827–1905 (2002); The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia (2014); and, in Russian, Orthodoxy, Unorthodoxy, Heterodoxy: Sketches on the Religious Diversity of the Russian Empire (2012). Having recently completed a term as head of his department, he is now researching a book on the significance of the seemingly obscure year 1837 for Russian history, while also contemplating future projects linking the histories of Russia and China.