Teren Sevea

Faculty Associate
Harvard Divinity School
Harvard University
Email: [email protected]
Website: Personal / faculty page
Biography
Teren Sevea is a scholar of Islam and Muslim societies in South and Southeast Asia, currently the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at Harvard Divinity School. Before joining HDS, he served as Assistant Professor of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Sevea is the author of Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and co-edited Islamic Connections: Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia (ISEAS, 2009). He is currently working on a forthcoming book entitled Singapore Islam: The Prophet's Port and Sufism across the Oceans.
Sevea is also the author of number of book chapters and journal articles pertaining to Indian Ocean networks, Sufi textual traditions, Islamic erotology and the socioeconomic significance of spirits, that have been published in journals such as Third World Quarterly and Modern Asian Studies. In addition to this, he is a coordinator of a multimedia project entitled “The Lighthouses of God: Mapping Sanctity Across the Indian Ocean,” which investigates the evolving landscapes of Indian Ocean Islam through photography, film and GIS technology.
Selected publications
- Book · 2020 Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya Cambridge University Press
- Article · 2026 The Islamic Siva Numen How Muslim texts in Malaya integrated Hindu divinities such as Siva into Islamic esoteric science.
- Article · 2022 Indian Ocean studies and saintly materials from the Islamic East History Compass
- Article · 2022 Exilic journeys and lives: Paths leading to a Mughal grave in Rangoon The Indian Economic & Social History Review Microhistories of Mughal and Muslim exiles in Burma, 1850s–1920s, including Bahadur Shah Zafar.
- Article · 2019 Pawangs on the Frontier: Miracles, prophets, and divinities in the ricefields of modern Malaya Modern Asian Studies Jawi manuscripts on pawangs, Muslim miracle-workers who led rice cultivation on Malaya's frontier.
Links go to the publisher's page. See all AGPT scholars' work in the Scholars' library.