R. Michael Feener is Professor of Cross-regional Studies at the Kyoto University Center for Southeast Asian Studies, an Associate Member of the History Faculty at the University of Oxford, and Director of the Maritime Asia Heritage Survey. The MAHS works to digitally document historical and archaeological sites across maritime Southern Asia, with full-time field teams active in the Maldives, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam to create a robust, durable, and open-access digital archive for the benefit of scholars around the world, as well as for local communities, conservationists, and heritage management practitioners.
The main focus of Professor Feener’s research is in Islamic Studies, with a particular emphasis on the cultural and intellectual history of Muslim societies of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean World. Within that geographic area, his first two monographs dealt with the history of legal thought and practice in Indonesia, and he has also worked in a number of other areas, publishing on topics including Qur’anic studies, Arabic biographical texts, Sufism, and Shi’ism. He brings to this project a specialization on Maritime Muslim societies in the Maldives and Southeast Asia, as well as the contribution of source material from those areas collected by the MAHS.