SOAS University of London

Faculty Member, History

Reader in South East Asian and Imperial History

About

Although the core of my research and teaching has been on societies in South East Asia, my training, teaching, and research interests are much broader and this is reflected in part in the focus in my work on issues of movement, contact, and friction in culture, technology, and religion in both the premodern and modern periods between cultures and in frontier zones as varied as Brahmanic and Buddhist interaction on the Chindwin River in Upper Burma, Islamic and Buddhist communalism in Arakan and Southeastern Bengal, Portuguese Catholic contact with Buddhist monks in lands around the Bay of Martaban, the meeting of Iberian and Malay cultures of war at Melaka in 1511, and most recently, American engineers and indigenous elites in colonial Ghana and the Shan States. My diversity of research and teaching interests probably owes much to the diversity of my postgraduate education, including M.A. degrees in Asian Studies at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and Asian History at Ohio University (Athens), which included a minor in African history, and a PhD in History from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), which included, in addition to my core premodern South East Asian history field, teaching fields in premodern Chinese, Japanese, and Russian history and modern Southeast Asian history. I also owe much to my exposure to great, dynamic, and interesting supervisors and instructors during my undergraduate and postgraduate years at Ohio and Michigan, as well as great colleagues in the years following, both at the Centre for Advanced Studies at the National University of Singapore (1999-2001), where I was a postdoctoral research fellow for two years working on migration and religion, and in the Department of History here at the School of Oriental and African Studies (2001 to the present). My three monographs include Southeast Asian Warfare, 1300-1900 (2004), Powerful Learning: Buddhist Literati and the Throne in Burma's Last Dynasty, 1752-1885 (2006), and A History of Modern Burma (2009). This most recent volume, A History of Modern Burma, was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2009 by Choice Magazine, published by the Association for College and Research Libraries. I also co-edited three volumes related to migration, education in Asia, and Overseas Chinese communities, edited a special issue of South East Asia Research on indigenous warfare in South East Asia (2004), and was chief editor from 2003 until 2010 of the SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research. I am in the process of turning my dissertation, "Where Jambudipa and Islamdom Converged: Religious Change and the Emergence of Buddhist Communalism in Early Modern Arakan, 15th-19th Centuries," from the University of Michigan--Ann Arbor (1999) into a book. Simultaneously, I am working on a history of railways in Africa and Asia, focusing in particular on the case studies of Ghana, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Japan. My staff page at the School of Oriental and African Studies, which has further information, can be accessed at http://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff30749.php Additionally, my author's page at Amazon.com can be found here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Michael-W.-Charney/e/B001JOAS7Q/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_1

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