The Indian Ocean World Podcast

Prof. Fiona Williamson (Singapore Management University) joins Dr. Philip Gooding to discuss her recently published monograph: Imperial Weather Meteorology, Science, and the Environment in Colonial Malaya (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025). Their discussion covers the development of meteorological science under British rule in colonial Singapore and Malaya, with real implications for how the impacts...

Prof. Alastair McClure (Hong Kong) joins Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) to discuss his first monograph, Trials of Sovereignty: Mercy, Terror and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857-1922 (Cambridge UP, 2024). Their conversation covers state violence, coercive mercy, and Indian national politics under the British Raj.

A specialist in South Asian legal history, Prof. McClure is Assistant Professor in the Department of...

Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) is joined by Adam Bobbette (Glasgow) to discuss his 2023 book, The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java, published by Duke University Press. Their conversation covers the history of plate tectonic theory, human-earth systems relationships, and how to live and do research in the Anthropocene.

Dr. Adam Bobbette is Lecturer in Political Geology in the School of Geographical & Earth Scienc...

Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) is joined by Dr. Lukas Ley and Tarini Monga (both Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) to discuss the research group, "S.AND - The Future of Coastal Cities in the Indian Ocean." Their conversation covers the shifting roles of sand in human environments, with particular attention to their current fieldwork in the port of Marseille and peri-urban Goa, respectively.

Lukas Ley is Research Head...

This week, Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC) is joined by Prof. James Warren (Murdoch) to discuss his monumental new book, Typhoons: Climate, Society, and History in the Philippines. Their conversation covers Prof. Warren's decades-long research project that led to this book, the impact of extreme storms on South East (and especially Philippine) history, and the shifting social dynamics that impact vulnerability to such events.

Prof. James...

For the first episode of this season, we are trying something new. Instead of an interview, this week we turn the feed over to another, Marit Kleinert, who takes us to Zanzibar in the first episode of her new show, Beyond Theory. It is a fantastic piece of audio documentary, merging music, field recording, interview, and (yes) a little bit of social science theory to explore the dynamic women's cooperative economic sector in the Za...

For the second annual Summer Research Roundup, Dr. Philip Gooding sits down with five research assistants employed here at the Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University to explore and recognize the hard work they've put into their research over the last year.

Nadia Fekih is entering her final year in Environmental Studies at McGill. She has been with the IOWC for nearly two years, with a paper (co-authored with Dr. Gooding) fort...

Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) is joined by Prof. Tasha Rijke-Epstein (Vanderbilt) to discuss her wonderful new book, Children of the Soil: The Power of Built Form in Urban Madagascar. Their conversation takes us to Mahajanga, a port city in northwestern Madagascar, considering the city's contested built environment, as well as the human and more-than-human interactions and complex (and sometimes fraught) migration histories tha...

This week, Dr. Nienke Boer (Sydney) joins our producer, Sam Gleave Riemann, to discuss her 2023 book, The Briny South: Displacement and Sentiment in the Indian Ocean World (Duke UP). They discuss the connections between post-colonial and ocean studies, feelings and their representations, and South Africa and the broader Indian Ocean World.

Dr. Boer has been Lecturer in World Literatures at the University of Sydney since early 2023....

In this episode, Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) is joined by Dr. John Lee (Durham) to discuss two recent article-length publications, his 2022 paper, “Sylvan Anxieties and the Making of Landscapes in Early Modern Korea,” and his chapter, “A State of Ranches and Forests: The Environmental Legacy of the Mongol Empire in Korea,” from the 2023 volume, Forces of Nature: New Perspectives on Korean Environments. As these titles suggest...

Prof. Krishnendu Ray (NYU) joins Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) to discuss a recent special volume of Verge: Studies in Global Asias, entitled "Culinary Cultures on the Move," which Prof. Ray co-edited, as well as his contribution to that volume, entitled "Food in the Indian Ocean World: Mobility, Materiality, and Cultural Exchange," which he coauthored with Dr. Kathleen Burke (NYU Shanghai) and Stephanie Jolly. This wide-rangin...

For the first episode of our new season, Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) welcomes Prof. Arunima Datta (University of North Texas) to discuss her article, "Race, Anxiety and Shopping in the Australian Outback: Indian Hawkers and Victoria's 1884 Smallpox Outbreak," as well as her newly-published second monograph, Waiting on Empire: A History of Indian Travelling Ayahs in Britain (Oxford UP, 2023). Their conversation covers many of ...

This week, Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) interviews Prof. Chris Gratien (UVA) about his highly-awarded new book, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier (Stanford UP, 2022). They talk about trends and methods in environmental history, the specific histories of Çukurova that the book explores, and the late Ottoman frontier as a frontier in turn of the vast Indian Ocean World.

Prof. Gratien is A...

Prof. Jeremy Prestholdt (UC San Diego) joins Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) to go behind-the-scenes on the new journal of Indian Ocean Studies, Monsoon, of which Prof. Prestholdt is founding co-editor. They also discuss some of Prof. Prestholdt's recent and upcoming research on the connections of the Western Indian Ocean and Indian Ocean Africa with global economic and cultural systems.

Prof. Prestholdt completed his PhD at Nort...

Our producer, Sam Gleave Riemann (IOWC, McGill), is joined by Julien Greschner to discuss his 2023 Masters thesis, "Solutions to Poverty According to Those Who Live It: Case Study in Manyatta B Informal Settlement, Kisumu, Kenya," covering definitions of poverty, community perceptions, and research processes in the global South under pandemic conditions.

Julien Greschner recently completed his MA in Geography at McGill University u...

Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) is joined by Dr. James Parker (Arizona State University) to discuss his 2022 paper, "Ecologies of Development: Ecophilosophies and Indigenous Action on the Tana River," published in History in Africa. The conversation covers colonial capitalism and its post-colonial hangovers along the river, the complex Indigenous responses to these forces, and the agency of the Tana itself in shaping these storie...

Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) welcomes Dr. James Beattie (Victoria University of Wellington) for a wide-ranging discussion of Dr. Beattie's work: the 2022 multi-author volume Migrant Ecologies: Environmental History of the Pacific World, which he co-edited with Ryan Tucker Jones and Edward Dallam Melillo; his chapter in that book, "Chinese Resource Frontiers, Environmental Change, and Entrepreneurship in the South Pacific, 1790...

Producer Sam Gleave Riemann (IOWC, McGill) is joined by Dr. Sophie Chao (Sydney) to discuss the complex ecologies of West Papuan oil palm plantations. They consider multispecies kinships, capitalist aggression, and the various critters who assist and oppose the oil palm's presence in Papua.

Dr. Chao completed her PhD at the Macquarie University in 2019 and is now a DECRA Fellow and Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydn...

In the first episode of our fall season, Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) is in conversation with Prof. Tamara Fernando (Stony Brook). Taking Prof. Fernando's 2023 paper, "Mapping Oysters and Making Oceans in the Northern Indian Ocean, 1880–1906," as their starting point, they discuss her research into the 19th-century pearl trade around the Indian Ocean World, which spans several historical subfields—animal and labour histories; ...