Education:
PhD: Indiana University, History, 2020
MA: Indiana University, Central Eurasian Studies, 2015
BS: Georgetown University, International History, 2013
Bio:
Amanda Lanzillo is a historian of modern Islamicate South Asia, working at the intersections of religious history, labor history, and the history of technology. She is also interested in trans-South Asian migration and mobility. Her first book, Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India was published as part of the open access Islamic Humanities series of the University of California Press in 2024. The book examined north Indian Muslim artisans’ claims to emerging technologies and Islamic traditions through printed Urdu-language technical manuals and community histories, c. 1855-1935.
Lanzillo is currently writing a second book on Afghan and Pashtun migration and the limitations of imperial subjecthood across India and the Indian Ocean, c. 1840-1960. Centering understudied Pashto, Persian, and Urdu texts, she argues for archival methodologies that prioritize migrants’ own narratives. This project is supported by an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, as well as by funding from the American Institutes of Indian, Sri Lankan, and Afghanistan studies. Her previous research was supported by Fulbright-Hays, the Library of Congress, AIIS, the American Historical Association, and other funders.
Lanzillo’s on-going projects also include two co-edited journal special issues. The first, “Making Artisans: Artisanal lives and production,” co-edited with Adhitya Dhanapal and Arun Kumar, seeks to disaggregate “artisan” as a historical category in modern South Asia and provide new insight on the experiences of regional artisan communities. The second, “Beyond Received Frameworks: Methodologies of the everyday in South Asian Islam,” co-edited with Harini Kumar, considers varied disciplinary approaches to “the everyday,” and how they might productively inform each other in the study of Islam. Additional research interests include the history of convict labor, print history, and the intersections of science and religious nationalisms in South Asia.
Lanzillo regularly writes for popular publications such as Himal Southasian, The Wire, Scroll, Jamhoor, and Ajam. With Arun Kumar, she is the coauthor of a series of popular articles on South Asian artisans’ laboring histories for The Wire.
Prior to joining the University of Chicago in 2024, she was a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Princeton University Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts and a lecturer in history at Brunel University London.
She is on leave for the 2024-2025 academic year.
Selected Publications
Book: Pious Labor: Islam, artisanship, and technology in colonial India, 2024
University of California Press, Islamic Humanities series (Open Access)
Journal Articles:
“Princely Prisons, State Exhibitions, and Muslim Industrial Authority in India, 1860-1935,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (2024)
“Prison Papermaking: Colonial Ideals of Industrial Experimentation in India,” Technology and Culture, 65, no. 1 (2024), pp. 63-87
“Building Peshawar: Labor, infrastructure, and technology at the edge of empire, 1848-1947,” Journal of Social History, vol. 53, no. 3 (2023): pp. 532-558
“Writing Industrial Change in Urdu: Artisanship, Islam, and technology in colonial India,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 44, no. 4 (2021): pp. 666-683
“Between Industry and Islam: Stonework and monumental tomb construction in colonial-era India,” Modern Asian Studies, vol 55, no. 5 (2021): pp. 1510-1543
“Butchers between Archives: Community history in early twentieth-century Delhi,” South Asian History and Culture, vol. 12, no. 4 (2021): pp. 357-370
“Translating the Scribe: Lithographic Print and Vernacularization in Colonial India, 1857–1915,” Comparative Critical Studies, vol. 16, no. 2-3 (2019): pp. 281-300
“Printing Princely Modernity: Lithographic design in Muslim-led princely states,” working note, South Asian Popular Culture, vol. 16, no. 2-3 (2018): pp. 245-252