The International Consortium for Indian Ocean Studies is a global, transoceanic interdisciplinary network dedicated to reimagining how the Indian Ocean is studied, taught, and engaged with, within and beyond academia. Emerging from sustained conversations among scholars, institutions, cultural practitioners, and community organisations across the region, the Consortium serves as a collaborative platform for knowledge exchange, capacity building, and public engagement.

As academic and public interest in the Indian Ocean grows, The International Consortium for Indian Ocean Studies  brings together historians, anthropologists, literary scholars, scientists, artists, climate researchers, policy makers, heritage practitioners, and community knowledge-claimers and holders. Our aim is to move past linguistic and geographic silos to imagine the Indian Ocean as a connected, plural, and textured space of relationships and a living laboratory for understanding human and ecological futures.

Anchored in the coastlines, islands, and communities of the region, the Consortium foregrounds regional institutions, early-career scholars, and civic actors as key beneficiaries and co-creators of its initiatives. Our activities span training exchanges, collaborative research, digital knowledge access, public-facing events, and the development of shared pedagogical resources.

"Southeast Asia is often portrayed as merely a recipient of cultural influences from the wider world. At best, scholars acknowledge that its peoples were active participants in these networks, but if that is the case, how did Southeast Asia shape the world in return?"

Tom Hoogervorst

Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV)

Tom Hoogervorst studies human connections and cultural contact through food and language. He began his undergraduate degree in Southeast Asian Studies at Leiden University, focusing on Indonesian linguistics, before completing a PhD in Archaeology at the University of Oxford. His dissertation—and later his first book—traced Southeast Asian influence on the early Indian Ocean world through loanwords and linguistic borrowing. After returning to Leiden, he wrote about the impact of South Asian languages on those of Southeast Asia. Because many of the loanwords he examined relate to plants, foodstuffs, and dishes, he also developed an academic interest in culinary history. In 2024, he launched a project on the culinary influence of early communities with roots in the Indonesian archipelago in Sri Lanka, South Africa, and Suriname.

More about Tom: https://oxford.academia.edu/TomHoogervorst

Mahmood Kooria

The University of Edinburgh

During his Masters, Mahmood became interested in Indian Ocean histories, a fascination that continues to this day. Along these lines, he completed my Ph.D. in Global History at Leiden University Institute for History in 2016. After his Ph.D., he has taught and worked in various countries and institutions, including the University of Bergen (Norway), Ashoka University (India), and the National Islamic University Jakarta (Indonesia). He has also worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), the African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL), and the Dutch Institute in Morocco (NIMAR). His research has been funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), New York, and the Dutch Research Council (NWO), the Hague.

He joined the University of Edinburgh in December 2023 and his research interests are in the premodern Indian Ocean world, global history of law, Islamic (legal, intellectual or textual) cultures, matrilineal-matriarchal communities, Afro-Asian connections, and manuscript traditions.

More about Mahmood: https://edwebprofiles.ed.ac.uk/profile/mahmood-kooria

Ariel Lopez

Asian Center, University of the Philippines

Ariel C. Lopez is Associate Professor and Assistant to the Dean for Research, Publications, and Information at the Asian Center, UP Diliman. He obtained his PhD in History (cum laude) from Leiden University, The Netherlands. He likewise received Research Master‟s (MPhil) and BA (cum laude) in History from Leiden University. He also holds a BA History (summa cum laude) degree from UP.

Ariel's areas of interests include Indonesian Studies, Colonial and Maritime History, Philippine History and Southeast Asian History

More about Ariel: https://ac.upd.edu.ph/index.php/faculty-and-staff/regular-faculty/1868-lopez-ariel-c-ph-d

"I've always been fascinated by the Indian Ocean as a vast network that connects people, places, and cultures across the region. It resonates deeply with my research on borders, mobility, and everyday spaces in Southeast Asia."

Lina Puryanti

Airlangga Insititute for Indian Ocean Crossroads (AIIOC), Airlangga University

Lina that kind of person who, when confronted with a border, does not so much stop as tilt her head, consider it briefly, and then proceed to ask whether it might be crossed, reimagined, or if necessary gently dissolved like a line drawn too close to the tide.

An Associate Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Airlangga, she is also the Director and co-founder of the Airlangga Institute of Indian Ocean Crossroads (AIIOC). Trained in Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore, Lina began by examining the border dynamics between Indonesia and Malaysia.

Lina approaches boundaries much like a wave: fluid, persistent, and quietly transformative. Her research asks how borders, whether state-defined or socially constructed, shape mobility, cultural practices, and community identities across Southeast Asia and what happens when those borders begin to shift.

More about Lina: https://scholar.unair.ac.id/en/persons/lina-puryanti-3/

Irfan Wahyudi 

Airlangga Insititute for Indian Ocean Crossroads (AIIOC), Airlangga University

Irfan is Assistant Professor on media and cultural studies at Universitas Airlangga, Indonesia, and one of the co-founders of the Airlangga Institute of Indian Ocean Crossroads (AIIOC). His research touched topics on media studies, activism, migration, virtual communications, community, social memories, and identity. His work including State sponsored stigma and discrimination: female Indonesian workers in Hong Kong during the Pandemic (2023), Social Media as a coping strategy for Indonesian migrant mothers in Hong Kong to maintain mothering roles (2024), and Biosecurity infectious diseases of the returning Indonesian migrant workers (2024). He also serves as Research Fellow at Edith Cowan University (2019), Curtin University (2023), and the International Institute of Asia Studies (IIAS), Leiden University (2023). In 2024, he acted as a co-Convenor of the 13th ICAS in Surabaya, Indonesia. He is the director of The Global Migration Research Center and Vice Director of the Airlangga Institute of Indian Ocean Crossroads (AIIOC).

Irfan's main research interests are digital media, migration, society, and communication technologies.

More about Irfan: linkedin.com/in/irfan-wahyudi-a137b644

"What sparked my fascination with the Indian Ocean and its stories is the relations with the Swahili coast and from across distant-water islands that share the same ocean"

Annachiara Raia

African Studies Centre, Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University

Annachiara Raia is Assistant Professor in African literature at Leiden University. Her research interests focus on Swahili Ajami literatures, grassroot literacies and Afro-Asian literary connections amid coastal and insular communities of the Indian Ocean. Her recent research projects – UMADA and Portable Islam – have been supported by the UCLA's Modern Endangered Archive Programme and the Dutch Research Council. At the African Studies Centre Leiden, she co-chairs the Collaborative Research Group African Language Archives: Unpacking Local Epistemologies. In partnership with radio broadcasters, publishers and poets from East Africa, she runs the TiaSauti@Lab ("GiveVoice@Lab"), a digital heritage atelier to bring Swahili religious poetry to life again.

More about Annachiara: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/annachiara-raia#tab-1 ; https://ascleiden.nl/organization/people/annachiara-raia

Zuriatunfadzliah Sahdan (Lia)

Universiti Sains Malaysia

Zuriatunfadzliah Sahdan is, by all sensible accounts, a long name. So just call her Lia (or Lieya), is a lecturer in Geography at the School of Humanities, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM). She is a social geographer attentive to voices often unheard - particularly women survivors of domestic violence; whose experiences are complex, concealed, and frequently challenge what society is willing to confront.

Her work is grounded in qualitative inquiry, specialising in Participatory Action Research (PAR) and grounded theory. She integrates PAR with creative methods such as photovoice, mural-making, and storytelling, cultivating research spaces that are at once analytical and activist. Through sustained engagement with abused women, she has developed a novel, trauma-responsive methodological approach attuned to fragmented and difficult narratives.

Her research also engages with culturally embedded interpretations of violence in Malaysia, including concepts such as demonic possession, also recognising the Malay language as a repository of concept and worldview. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, she has advanced trauma-informed sampling through social media to reach survivors, and continues to extend her work into digital activism and theatre based on PAR data. Her research spans multiple spatial and conceptual terrains; urban and rural, public and private, psyche and body, Malaysia-UK, through a postcolonial lens. She has conducted in-depth qualitative research with diverse communities, including flood survivors, youth in juvenile contexts, stroke patients, and the Orang Asli Bateq community

"My interest in the Indian Ocean began with coastal cities and islands in Southeast Asia and places that are never quite sure whether they are land or water and refuse to make up their minds. Because once you start studying edges, you inevitably end up questioning who drew the lines, with what ruler, and whether they were having a bad day at the time."

Aireen Grace Andal

The International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University

Airlangga Institute for Indian Ocean Crossroads, Airlangga University

Aireen is a children's geographer, which is not, as some might assume, someone who draws very small maps, but rather someone who takes children seriously enough to notice how cities rearrange themselves around them. She works on Urban Studies, Urban Spaces, and Children's Geographies, which are fields that sound orderly until you actually look at a city from a certain angle.  She is part of AIIOC and the Southeast Asia Neighborhood Network (SEANNET), both of which involve a great deal of thinking about places, human mortals, non-humans, and how they stubbornly refuse to stay in neat categories.

Her Indian Ocean adventures began, as these things often do, with a curiosity about coastal cities and islands in Southeast Asia. And as often happens in research, one thing led to another, which led to collaboration with her ocean sister Lina Puryanti on islands and border studies.

She asks awkward questions, particularly about peri-urban transitions across the Indian Ocean world and those fascinating spaces where cities are becoming something else, and nobody has quite agreed on what that something is yet :)

More about Aireen: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7487-4742