Alok Ranpise

My research looks at Indian merchants’ firms and communities within Yokohama, Kobe, Hong Kong, and Singapore, from approximately 1905-1955. I consider them as a nonstate, transimperial network of commercial exchange and people-to-people connection between Japanese and British ports, obscured by state-centric historiography. I also scrutinize how they interacted with and supported varied political activists and academics (including Indian anticolonial and alternative political networks in East Asia). My research interests include transnational history, nonstate networks, port/entrepot connections, transnational surveillance of emigrant/expatriate communities, associational life, East/Southeast/South Asia, oceanic history.

As a B.A. student, I undertook study-abroad semesters in Seoul, Chengdu, and Brussels, seeking a multi-sited education to prepare for an envisioned potential diplomatic career. After receiving my B.A. in 2018, I spent a year in the town of Wuyi in Zhejiang province, China, as an assistant English teacher, followed by seven months in my hometown Mumbai working at the non-profit organization Mumbai First. I began my M.A. studies during the early pandemic months and finished in 2022. Most recently, I was a Junior Humanities Fellow at Morningside College, Chinese University of Hong Kong from 2022-24. I deeply enjoyed tutoring undergraduate students and contributing to college programming at Morningside, and hope to eventually become a professor of Asia’s 20th century transnational history.

College: St Antony’s College

Department: Faculty of History

Supervisor: Professor Yasmin Khan, Professor Sho Konishi

Previous Degrees: M.A. Asian Studies from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service (2022); B.A. Economics, International Relations from Boston University (2018).