Profile
Sjahari Pullom is a Ph.D. Candidate in his last year of study in the Department of History at the University of California, San Diego. He is currently completing his dissertation, “Imperial Education: Colonial Colleges, Indigenous Elites, and Cultural Syncretism in New Spain (1521-1605) and the British Raj (1817-1855).” The study is an analysis of programs of acculturation centered on two flagship colleges, one in each colony. These programs were designed to accustom local elites to European forms of knowledge and inculcate European values and beliefs to the children of indigenous elites, in the hopes of creating an affinity between these elites and the European rulers of the newly created colonial empires. The study gives insights into how the process of acculturation functioned at an on-the-ground level and how the results of these programs were a product of continual negotiation, cooperation, and conflict between colonizer and colonizer, and reflect not only the goals of each group, but the unintended consequences of pursuing those goals as well. Sjahari was born in Detroit and grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Northern Kentucky. He attended college in the Washington, D.C. area and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Political Science/International Relations in 1994. After serving for nine years in the U.S. Navy, Sjahari was honorably discharged in 2003 and became a full-time doctoral student at UC San Diego. Sjahari is married to the former Roekmini Harris of San Diego, and lives with his wife and their four wonderful children, Stephen, Alejandro, Rahim, and Matiana in student housing at the university.
