Biography
I am a historian of South Asia and the Indian Ocean, with particular interests in religion and empire.
My first book, Hajj across Empires: Pilgrimage and Political Culture after the Mughals, 1739-1857 (Cambridge University Press, 2024), explores how South Asian Muslims navigated the imperial transitions between Mughal decline and British colonial consolidation by forging transregional ties through pilgrimage to Arabia and the Ottoman world. These journeys, I argue, were key to reimagining Islamic political life across the Indian Ocean during the age of revolutions. For a preview of the book's themes, you can read a short piece I wrote for the Cambridge University Press blog.
I’m now at work on two new book projects. The first, Colonizing Babel: The Command of Persian in British India, examines how the East India Company collaborated with the literati of the late Mughal empire to refashion Persian – a classical lingua franca of the Indian Ocean – as a language of modern administration, diplomacy, science, and sociology. Rather than viewing colonial Persian culture as in decline, the book highlights its surprising intellectual adaptability under British rule.
The second is a microhistory of the Nawabs of Dacca, an influential landed family best known as early patrons of the Muslim League. Drawing on private archives, the book shows how this neo-Mughal, feudatory dynasty – loyal to the British yet fluent in the idioms of modern liberal mass politics – shaped the idea of “East Pakistan” in colonial Bengal. In tracing this family’s role in provincial Muslim politics, the project offers a new perspective on the prehistory of East Pakistan’s eventual end in a bloody civil war.
I have held fellowships at the Social Science Research Council, the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Library of Congress. My writing has appeared in The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Modern Asian Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Itinerario, and Modern Intellectual History.
At Oberlin College, I teach courses on South Asia, the British empire, and the Indian Ocean world. In my first-year writing seminar, “Pilgrimage in Global History,” students and I explore sacred travel across time and place through interdisciplinary readings in anthropology, literature, social theory, and art history.
