Michael Francis Laffan studies the history of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean region. He earned his BA in Asian studies (Arabic) at the Australian National University in Canberra (1995) and got his PhD in Southeast Asian history from the University of Sydney (2001). He came to Princeton in 2005 from a postdoctoral fellowship at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, the Netherlands. In his first book, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma Below the Winds (Routledge, 2003), he argued that Islam played a central and largely unacknowledged role in the Indonesian nationalist movement, which historians have tended to associate mainly with a secular, Dutch-educated elite. His second book, The Makings of Indonesian Islam (Princeton, 2011), looks at the results of an engagement between Islamic reformers with intellectual links to Cairo and influential colonial scholars, arguing that they set the parameters for the ways in which Islam has been, and still is, imagined in specific ways in both Southeast Asia and the Academy. His newest book, Under Empire: Muslim Lives and Loyalties Across the Indian Ocean World, 1775-1945 (Columbia University Press, 2022), looks at two centuries of interactions between Muslim subjects of empires and nation states across the Indian Ocean. Starting in Cape Town in the 1770s and finishing in Java under the Japanese occupation of 1942-45, it interrogates notions of Malayness, loyalty, and religious authority at moments of regime change. He has also edited collections of essays (one with Gyan Prakash and Nikhil Menon) on ideas of belonging around the Bay of Bengal and the postcolonial moment in South and Southeast Asia. These came out with Bloomsbury Academic Press in 2016 and 2017.
