Congratulations to NUS History's Dr Sureshkumar Muthukumaran for winning the American History Association's Jerry Bentley Prize in World History! Dr Muthukumaran received the award for his 2023 book, The Tropical Turn: Agricultural Innovation in the Ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean (University of California Press), which draws on archaeological materials and textual sources in over seven ancient languages to document the earliest histories of tropical Asian crops such as rice, cotton, citruses, and cucumbers in the ancient Middle East and Mediterranean.

The Jerry Bentley Prize in World History, established by the American Historical Association in 2014, is awarded annually to the best book in world history. Any book published in English dealing with global or world-scale history, with connections or comparisons across continents, is eligible.

Dr Muthukumaran is the first NUS Department of History faculty member to win an award from the American Historical Association (AHA). The AHA is one of the most prestigious and largest professional history associations both in the United States and worldwide. Established in 1884 and incorporated by Congress in 1889, the AHA has conferred over a thousand awards since 1896. The Jerry Bentley Prize will be formally conferred at the AHA's annual meeting in New York City on 3 January 2025.

The Tropical Turn is Dr Muthukumaran's first book. An alumnus of the University of Oxford and University College London, he completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Yale-NUS before joining the NUS Department of History. Dr Muthukumaran has also published original research articles in Plants, People, Planet, Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, Papers from the Institute of Archeology, South Asian Studies, and PloS One. He is currently finishing a book co-authored with Dr Sushma Jansari, which will accompany a major upcoming international exhibition on ancient India at the British Museum.