Dr. Alexander Wain is a member of the School of Divinity at the University of St Andrews, UK, where he lectures in Islamic studies and edits the Islam section of the St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology, an evolving online academic resource. A specialist in the eastern Islamic world, his primary research interests lie in the history and literary traditions of the Malay Muslim world (modern-day Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, southern Thailand, southern Philippines, and Singapore), with an ancillary focus on China’s hui-hui Muslim ethnic grouping.
After obtaining his DPhil from the University of Oxford with a thesis focused on the role Sino-Muslims played in the conversion of Maritime Southeast Asia to Islam, Alexander lived in Kuala Lumpur for six years, where he worked as a Research Fellow at IAIS. His forthcoming monograph, Islam and the Lands Below the Wind, explores the Islamic conversion history of the Malay world from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries.