McGill University
Staff
Managers
Philip Gooding
Philip Gooding is a former Postdoctoral Fellow. He is now a Project Manager at the Centre. For more information on Philip, see here.
Sofia O’Reilly
Sofia O’Reilly initially got involved with the IOWC through the publication of her paper Reproductive Resistance: Abortion, Infanticide, and Agency Among Enslaved Women in Madagascar and the Mascarenes, 17th to 19th Century in the working paper series. Since then, she has worked as a research assistant researching, transcribing, and translating archives from 19th-century Madagascar and the Mascarenes. She now serves as a Project Manager alongside Philip Gooding.
Research Assistants
Lilia Scudamore
Lilia Scudamore joined the IOWC as a research assistant in February 2023. Since then, she has worked on several projects, with particular emphasis on public health in the IOW. These projects have included examining 19th-century Church Missionary Society archives from China, studying medical reports and water infrastructure in the British Straits Settlements, and analyzing the racialization of tuberculosis in India at the turn of the 20th century. Currently, she is working on a project mapping cholera epidemics in Singapore. She earned her BA in History, Political Science, and Economics and her MA in History at McGill University.
Debanjan Das
Debanjan Das is currently pursuing his Master’s in History at McGill, with his thesis studying sexual knowledge production in the British Empire. At the IOWC, he is working on collecting data on the 1876-1878 El-Nino event and famines in South Asia, from contemporary newspapers. He is also involved in cataloguing the textual, visual and cartographic holdings of the IOWC.
Ian Xu
Ian Xu is an undergraduate student at McGill University majoring in History and Political Science. He joined the IOWC in May 2024. Currently, Ian is working on digitizing the IOWC’s James de Vere Allen Archival Collection, which will be made available online in the near future. He has previously researched the effects of late-19th-century weather conditions on public health in the former Straits Settlements.
Sean Eslami
Indian Ocean World Centre 