Underwood International College

Associate Professor of History

• Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge
• Ph.D. in History, University of London

Profile

I am an intellectual and cultural historian whose main area of teaching and research is British interactions with the wider world in the period after 1800.

Education

Ph.D. in History, University of London
M.A. in Cultural History, University of London
B.A. in History, University of York

Courses and Current Research Areas

Current research interests

I am currently researching the impact of the nineteenth-century Roman Catholic revival on British theories of empire. I am also involved in projects on the history of Protestant missions in Korea and on the foreign Christian presence in modern South Korea.

Selected Publications

• L M Ratnapalan, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pacific: the Global Transformation of Christianity (Edinburgh University Press, scheduled March 2023)
• L M Ratnapalan, ‘“Our Father’s Footprints:” Robert Louis Stevenson’s Anthropology of Conversion, 1888-1894’, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies (forthcoming)
• Paul Tonks and L M Ratnapalan, ‘Bound “Together by the Golden Thread of a Common Tradition”? Decolonization, Identity and the Legacies of Empire in British-South Asian Relations’, International History Review (2022)
• L M Ratnapalan, ‘Missionary Christianity and Culture in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Beach of Falesá”’, Religion and Literature 53, 3 (2021)
• Paul Tonks and L M Ratnapalan, ‘Ideologies of the New Commonwealth, International History Review 43, 4 (2021)
• L M Ratnapalan, ‘“Half Christian”: Indigenization and Inculturation in Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction’, Scottish Literary Review 12, 1 (2020)
• L M Ratnapalan, ‘“The greater Issue of Light against Darkness”: Sereno Edwards Bishop and the Hawaiian Islands, 1827-1909," Journal of Religious History, 43, 1 (2019)
• L M Ratnapalan, "Science and Politics in the Hawaiian Kingdom: The progress of the Honolulu Social Science Association, 1882-87," Journal of Pacific History 53, 2 (2018)
• L M Ratnapalan, "Another British World? Tamils, Empire, and Mobility," Britain and the World 10, 1 (2017)
• L M Ratnapalan, "Britain and the Politics of Ceylon, 1948-1961," The Historical Journal 59, 2 (2016)
• L M Ratnapalan, ‘“Why Disgrace the Commonwealth?” The Sri Lankan Language Crisis and the Politics of a Transnational Organization, 1948-65," The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 44, 2 (2016)
• L M Ratnapalan, "Before and After 1983: the Impact of Theorizing Sri Lankan Migration History around the 1983 Colombo Riots," South Asia 37, 2 (2014)
• Laavanyan M. Ratnapalan, "Sereno Bishop, Robert Louis Stevenson and 'Americanism' in Hawai’i," The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, 3 (2012)
• Laavanyan M. Ratnapalan and David Reggio, "Erwin Straus and the Pathic," History of Psychiatry 23, 3 (2012)
• Laavanyan M. Ratnapalan, "Memories of Ethnic Violence in Sri Lanka Among Immigrant Tamils in the UK," Ethnic and Racial Studies 35, 9 (2012)
• L M Ratnapalan, "Engaging Theology in History: Problems and Prospects," Situations 6 (Winter 2012)
• Laavanyan Ratnapalan, "Stevenson’s Anthropology of the Pacific Islands," Journal of Stevenson Studies, 6 (2009)
• Laavanyan Ratnapalan, "E B Tylor and the Problem of Primitive Culture," History and Anthropology, vol. 19, no. 2 (2008)
• Laavanyan Ratnapalan, "Robert Louis Stevenson and Cultural Survivals in the South Seas," Journal of Stevenson Studies, 3 (2006)