Gonville & Caius College Fellow Professor Sujit Sivasundaram has been elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.

Sujit joined the College as a Research Fellow in 2001, was a College Teaching Officer at the College and served as Tutor for six years. He is now Professor of World History at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge.

Founded in 1902, the British Academy is the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. Each year, the British Academy elects to its fellowship up to 52 outstanding UK-based scholars who have achieved distinction in any branch of the humanities and social sciences, with the 2023 announcement taking place on Friday 21 July.

Sujit said: “World history is about reaching for unexpected places to bring light to the human present and future. Research in this field is necessarily and fittingly collaborative and builds on the insights of librarians, curators, students and intellectuals, among others, in various places in the world. I thank all my friends, spread so far and wide, for pointing me to the right path in my research. This honour belongs to all of them.”

Sujit won the prestigious British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding for his book Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire in October 2021. It also jointly won the Jerry Bentley Prize for World History 2022.

He featured on the College website earlier this year, discussing his European Research Council Advanced Grant for the study of the global south city, focused on the long history of Colombo, Sri Lanka, from the ninth century to the present.

Photo credit: Lloyd Mann, University of Cambridge