Dr. Adam Clulow is a global historian whose work has reassessed the early modern encounter between Europe and Asia. He is a pioneer in the use of technology, namely historical video games, digital Public History magazines and VR (virtual reality), to make history accessible to both students and public audiences. He has received faculty, university and national teaching prizes for outstanding contributions to student learning.

His work encompasses both East and Southeast Asia with particular focus on early modern Japan. Drawing on sources in Japanese, Dutch, classical Chinese and English, he has written extensively on early modern diplomatic interactions, transnational legal frameworks, the role of the Dutch East India Company in Asia, the  Japanese diaspora in early modern Southeast Asia, commodity exchange, slavery in Asia and maritime violence.

Clulow is the creator of the Amboyna conspiracy trial, an interactive Digital Humanities project focused on a famous seventeenth century case that took place in what is now Indonesia. The project received the New South Wales Premiers History Award (Multimedia History Prize) in 2017.

In collaboration with colleagues at Monash University, where he taught for a decade, Clulow also developed the Virtual Angkor project, which aims to recreate the sprawling Cambodian metropolis of Angkor at the height of the Khmer Empire’s power and influence around 1300. It received the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History, the 2021 Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize from the Medieval Academy of America and the gold medal at the Wharton School – QS Reimagine Education Awards.

Clulow was awarded the Jerry Bentley Book Prize for World History by the American Historical Association for his book The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan (Columbia University Press, 2014). The book also garnered the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) 2015 Humanities Book Prize, the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction 2015 Book Prize, and the W.K. Hancock Prize from the Australian Historical Association.

The traditional Chinese translation of The Company and the Shogun (Gōngsī yǔ mùfǔ) was awarded the China Times Open Book Award in 2020.

Clulow’s second book, Amboina, 1623: Conspiracy and Fear on the Edge of Empire (Columbia University Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premiers General History Book Prize and was a runner-up for the 2020 Robert W. Hamilton Book Award.

In 2021, Clulow was elected Corresponding Fellow by the Australian Academy of the Humanities.