Adam Clulow

Biography

Adam Clulow is the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas at the University of Texas at Austin. His work is concerned broadly with the transnational circulation of ideas, people, practices and commodities across East and Southeast Asia. Dr. Clulow’s first book, The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan, was published in 2014 and received the Jerry Bentley Book Prize for World History from the American Historical Association, the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) 2015 Humanities Book Prize, the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction 2015 Book Prize, and the W.K. Hancock Prize from the Australian Historical Association.  The traditional Chinese translation of The Company and the Shogun was awarded the China Times Open Book Award in 2020. His second book, Amboina, 1623: Conspiracy and Fear on the Edge of Empire, was published by Columbia University Press in 2019. It was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premiers General History Book Prize and was a runner-up for the 2020 Robert W. Hamilton Book Award.

Dr Clulow is the editor of four books: with D.V. Botsman, Commemorating Meiji: History, Politics and the Politics of History (Routledge, 2021); with Tristan Mostert, The Dutch and English East India Companies: Diplomacy, Trade and Violence in Early Modern Asia (Amsterdam University Press, 2018); with Lauren Benton and Bain Attwood, Protection and Empire: A Global History (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and Statecraft and Spectacle in East Asia: Studies in Taiwan-Japan Relations (Routledge, 2011 and 2013). His research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Australian Research Council, the Fung Global Fellows Program (Princeton University), the Japan Foundation, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the Mellon Foundation. In 2021, he was elected as a Corresponding Fellow by the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2023, Dr Clulow was awarded the Dan David Prize, which is the largest history prize in the world.

Dr. Clulow is the creator of the Amboyna conspiracy trial, an interactive Digital Humanities project focused on a famous seventeenth century case that took place in what is now Indonesia.  It received the New South Wales Premiers History Award (Multimedia History Prize) in 2017. Along with Tom Chandler at Monash University, he developed the Virtual Angkor project which aims to recreate the sprawling Cambodian metropolis of Angkor at the height of the Khmer Empire’s power and influence around 1300. It received the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History in 2019, the 2021 Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize from the Medieval Academy of America and a Gold Medal from the QS-Wharton Reimagine Education Awards in 2021.