Muzaffar Alam is a historian trained at Jamia Millia Islamia (New Delhi), Aligarh Muslim University and Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi), where he obtained his doctorate in history in 1977. Before joining the SALC at the University of Chicago in 2001, he taught for three decades at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and has held visiting positions in the Collège de France (Paris), Leiden University, University of Wisconsin (Madison), and the EHESS (Paris). His working languages include Persian, Arabic, Hindi and Urdu. Professor Alam has taught courses on the history of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal empire, and he has also worked closely with students on advanced Urdu and Persian literary and historical texts.
Research Interests:
History of religious and literary cultures in pre-colonial northern India, history of Indo-Persian travel accounts, comparative history of the Islamic world (as seen from an Indian perspective)
Publications Include:
Books:
The Crisis of
Empire in Mughal North India (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1986)
The Mughal State
1526-1750 (edited with Sanjay Subrahmanyam)
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998)
A European
Experience of the Mughal Orient (with Seema Alavi)
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001)
The Languages of
Political Islam in India: c. 1200-1800 (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2004)
Indo-Persian
Travels in the Age of Discovery: 1400-1800 (With
Sanjay Subrahmanyam) (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007)
Papers:
“Assimilation from a Distance: Confrontation and
Sufi Accommodation in Awadh Society,”
in R. Champakalakshmi and S. Gopal (eds.)
Tradition, Dissent and Ideology: Essays in Honour
of Romila thapar, Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1996.
“Shari`a and Governance in Indo-Islamic
Context,”
in David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence (eds.),
Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious
Identities in Islamicate South Asia, Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2000.
“The Culture and Politics of Persian in
Precolonial Hindustan,”
in Sheldon Pollock (ed.), Literary Cultures in
History: Reconstructions from South Asia,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
“The Afterlife of a Mughal Masnavi: The
Tale of Nal and Daman in Urdu and Persian,”
(with S. Subrahmanyam), in Kathryn Hansen and David
Lelyveld (eds.), A Wilderness of Possibilities:
Urdu Studies in Transnational Perspective, Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 46-73.
Related Links: |
