Biography

Dr. Joshua Gedacht teaches in the fields of the Modern Middle East, South Asia, the Indian Ocean and Islam in Asia. Dr. Gedacht received his B.A. from McGill University in Canada and his Ph.D. in Southeast Asian history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Before arriving at Rowan, he worked for several years in Asia as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and as Assistant Professor at the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. His research examines colonial era war-making, Muslim networks, and the reconfiguration of religious connections extending from Southeast Asia through the Indian Ocean world and onward to the Middle East. His current book project, Coercive Cosmopolitanism: War and Islam in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1800-1940, considers the ways in which imperial conquest engendered paradoxical dynamics of exclusion and inclusion, disconnection and reconnection. He also has published widely on the relationship between colonial violence and trans-regional Islamic networks, including a co-edited book titled Challenging Cosmopolitanism: Coercion, Mobility, and Displacement in Islamic Asia (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), peer-reviewed journal articles and entries in the Muslim World, Itinerario, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, an open-access entry in the online Database of Religious History, as well as numerous book chapters.  Dr. Gedacht is a member of the Association of Asian Studies (AAS) and the New York Southeast Asia Network (NYSEAN).