I am a historian specializing in multilingual archival research and transnational approaches to the Western Pacific, covering East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Australasia (ca. 1600-1900s). I earned my DPhil in History from the University of Oxford and previously held a postdoctoral position at Brown University (East Asian Studies & Cogut Institute for the Humanities). I was awarded an Ivan Morris Prize by the British Association for Japanese Studies for my discovery of materials in the Netherlands that reveal transnational dimensions to the history of Jōdo Shinshū Buddhism.
My current research is broadly concerned with the question of how nature shapes the course of history. I am working on a history of the Arafura Zone, which was an oceanic space of transnational coexistence and solidarity – a radical social experiment that historically valorizes non-state forms of organization and intellectual life. I am also working on a project that takes a Critical Indigenous Studies approach to the history of Southeast Asia – which involves a language revitalization project for a ‘moribund’ language spoken in North Sulawesi. Both projects examine historical processes that are systematically excluded from the global history of industrial modernity. This year I will also be working with the Rockbund Art Museum on a series of events on the Pacific Ocean and related knowledge making practices.
Select Publications
Manimporok, “The Rest, the West, and the Ugly: Towards a Transnational Judgment of History,” Irish Studies in International Affairs, (forthcoming).
Manimporok, “Hyakushō in the Arafura Zone: Ecologizing the Nineteenth-Century ‘Opening of Japan’,” Past and Present 257:1 (Nov. 2022), pp. 280-317.
Bremner, Konishi, Manimporok (eds.), Reopening the Opening of Japan: Transnational Approaches to Modern Japan and the Wider World, Brill, 2023.
Research Interests
Social, cultural, environmental, and intellectual history
Transnationalism
Critical Indigenous Studies
Language