Date:
Monday, February 20, 2023 - 4:30pm
STEPS 290
Indian Knowledge and the Making of Modern History
Shahzad Bashir
Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities and Professor of History and Religious Studies at Brown University
This talk will highlight the vast, multi-lingual archive pertaining to global history that was created in India during the period of the English East India Company (ca. 1780-1850). I seek to displace our sense for the genealogy of modern history from Europe to India, where we see Indians as well as Europeans deploy a mixture of sources and methods to account for the world’s past. The variety and creativity on display in this period can help us to diversity how we undertake historical work today.
Shahzad Bashir is Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities and Professor of History and Religious Studies at Brown University. His most recent books are the multimodal digital monograph A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (MIT Press, 2022) and The Market for Poetry in the Persian World (Cambridge, 2021). His earlier published work has treated Sufism and Shi’ism, messianic movements, and corporeality.
