Team 5 - Currents of Exchange in the IOW

This team will research the currents of exchange in the IOW by examining the diffusion of language, ideas and geographical awareness. In the period up to mid-2013, it will focus on a few particular areas: (i) the lingua-francas of the IOW over the past three thousand years, (ii) the diffusion of rhetorical, dialectical, astronomical and mathematical traditions within the IOW; (iii) the extent of geographical knowledge of the IOW, and (iv) the interrelationship between the diffusion of religious ideas and commercial exchange along main IOW trade routes.

Latest Team Publications

TEAM LEADER

Brendan Gillon, McGill University

Brendan S. Gillon received an MA in East Asian Studies from the University of Michigan, an MA in Sanskrit and Indian Studies from the University of Toronto, and a PhD in philosophy from MIT. After teaching philosophy at the University of Alberta and the University of Toronto, he is now a member of McGill University's Department of Linguistics and an associate of its Department of Philosophy. His research is divided between natural language semantics, Sanskrit linguistics and the history of logic and metaphysics in India, all areas in which he has published extensively. He is the co-editor of Semantics: A Reader (OUP, 2004) and the editor of Logic in Early Classical India (Motilal Banarsidass, 2010).

COLLABORATORS

Ronald Kydd, Tyndale Seminary

After a PhD in Patristics at the University of St. Andrews (Scotland), Ron taught and filled administrative roles at two Bible Colleges in Canada, served various parishes and taught occasional courses at the University of Saskatchewan, Saint Paul University and McMaster Divinity College. His publications are in Church History and his primary research interest is currently the Church of the East prior to 1400. He is presently a Research Professor of Church History at Tyndale Seminary, Toronto.

Nicholas Ostler, University of London

Nicholas Ostler is the Chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages based in Bath, England, and is also a Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He holds a PhD in linguistics from MIT and an MA in Classics, Philosophy and Economics from the University of Oxford. He is the author of three recent books: Empires of the Word: a language history of the world, Ad Infinitum: a biography of Latin and The Last Lingua Franca: English until the return of Babel.

His academic research has focused on the Chibchan languages of Central and South America, notably Muisca and Tunebo, which has also led him into more general studies of missionary linguistics worldwide. He is also interested in the complex social history of languages in Central, South and South-East Asia.

Faiz Ragep, McGill University

F. Jamil Ragep is Canada Research Chair in the History of Science in Islamic Societies and Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Educated at the University of Michigan and Harvard University, he has written extensively on the history of astronomy and on science in Islam. He is currently leading an international effort to catalogue all Islamic manuscripts in the exact sciences and is co-directing a project to study the fifteenth-century background to the Copernican revolution. http://www.mcgill.ca/islamicstudies/faculty/jamil-ragep/

STUDENTS

Jennifer Craig, University of Oxford

Jennifer L.O. Craig received her MA in Maritime History and Archaeology from the University of Bristol. After which she conducted archaeological fieldwork, project organization/proposal preparation and museum gallery design preparation she is now working towards her DPhil in Archaeology at the University of Oxford. Her research is divided between analysis of beads recovered from historic shipwrecks archaeologically excavated from Philippine waters and; the analysis of past sailors' cognitive awareness of space through their navigation tools and world views within and adjacent to the Indian and Pacific Oceans. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming UNESCO - Bangkok, Asian Academy for Heritage Management's Inaugural Asia-Pacific Regional Conference on Underwater Cultural Heritage Proceedings.

PAST STUDENTS

Kelly Sharp, McGill University

Kelly Sharp holds a Bachelor of Arts in History and International Development Studies from McGill University. She participated in McGill’s Canadian Field Studies in Africa program in 2011, where she studied in East Africa and along the Swahili Coast for a full semester. She has also completed internships in Kenya and Ghana. Her main interests include conservation and human-environment interaction, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and throughout the Indian Ocean World.