Research Interests: pre-modern Arabic sources on Indonesia and the Malay world, cultural connections between the Middle East and maritime Southeast Asia, Indian Ocean history, history and cultural anthropology of Sumatra.
Dr. Maftuhin is an associate professor in Islamic Law at the State Islamic University of Sunan Kalijaga, Indonesia. Currently he is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Asian Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and collaborates with Prof. Ronit Ricci in the ERC-funded project, "Textual Microcosms: A New Approach in Translation Studies." He will work mainly on the literature of "kitab makna gandhul," a massive Javanese translation of Islamic Arabic books popularly used in the Islamic education system in Java, Indonesia.
Dr. Maftuhin is also an activist working on the rights of persons with disabilities in Indonesia. Since 2010 he has been helping people with disabilities to get their educational rights and open access to higher education. He was Head of the Center for Services for Persons with Disabilities (2013-2020). He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of INKLUSI: Journal of Disability Studies.
For more detailed information about his works, check his blog at https://maftuh.in
Dr Rom is a Louis Frieberg Postdoctoral Fellow during the autumn-winter semester of the academic year 2021-22. She earned her BA in East Asian Studies (2013) from Tel-Aviv University; and her MPhil (2015) and PhD (2020) in Chinese Studies from the University of Cambridge.
Her research focuses on the social and political aspects of hearing, sound, and silence in early China (particularly the Warring States and Western Han periods). Her doctoral dissertation, titled Polyphonic Thinking: Music and Authority in Early China, examined the rhetorical and political functions of music in the Warring States (453-221 BCE) and Western Han (206 BCE – 9 CE) periods. Currently, she researches the social history of deafness in early China, and editing a volume on the history of disability in ancient China, titled Other Bodies: Disability and Bodily Impairment in Early China. She is also finalising the manuscript of a monograph based on her doctoral dissertation.
Dr Rom has been teaching Classical Chinese at the University of Cambridge since 2016. This semester, she will be teaching an MA course titled ‘Music and Political Authority in Chinese History – From the Warring States to Early Medieval Times.’ Her publications include the articles ‘Echoing Rulership: Understanding Musical References in the Huainanzi’ (Early China, 2017) and ‘Beat the Drums or Break Them: Bells and Drums as Communication Devices in Early Chinese Warfare’ (Journal of Chinese Military History, 2020).
