Sureshkumar Muthukumaran

Born and raised in Singapore, Sureshkumar received his BA in history at University College London, a Masters in Greek and Roman History at the University of Oxford and a DPhil in History at University College London. Prior to joining the History department and College of Humanities and Sciences at NUS, Sureshkumar was a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Yale-NUS College. His work focuses on interactions between peoples in ancient Afro-Eurasia with an eye to examining long-distance connectivity. His work uses, in particular, the anthropogenic mobility of cultivated plants and other biological materials (fauna, diseases etc.) as a roadmap to understand cross-cultural exchanges and the movements of people through space and time.

TEACHING AREAS:

• Antiquity (Mediterranean, North Africa, Middle East & South Asia)
• Integrated Humanities

CURRENT RESEARCH:

• Resinous plants in antiquity

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

• The Tropical Turn: Agricultural Innovation in the Ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023.
• Literary evidence for taro in the ancient Mediterranean: A chronology of names and uses in a multilingual world with I. Grimaldi et al. PloS one 13, no. 6 (2018): e0198333.
• Tree Cotton (G. arboreum) in Babylonia. In Foietta, E. et al (eds.) Cultural and Material Contacts in the Ancient Near East. Florence: Apice Libri, 2016, 98 – 105.
• Between Archaeology and Text: The Origins of Rice Consumption and Cultivation in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Papers from the Institute of Archaeology, 24(1) (2014) 1-7.