Manan Ahmed

Associate Professor

Email: ma3179@columbia.edu

Text; Space and narrative; South Asia; Critical philosophy of history; Colonial and anti-colonial thought; Islam in South Asia

Manan Ahmed, Associate Professor, is a historian of South Asia and the littoral western Indian Ocean world from 1000-1800 CE. His areas of specialization include intellectual history in South and Southeast Asia; critical philosophy of history, colonial and anti-colonial thought. He is interested in how modern and pre-modern historical narratives create understandings of places, communities, and intellectual genealogies for their readers.

His first book, A Book of Conquest: Chachnama and Muslim origins in South Asia (Harvard University Press, 2016), is an intellectual life of an early thirteenth-century Persian history Chachnama also known as Fathnama-i Sind (Book of the Conquest of Sindh) and how polities dealt with religious difference, created new ethics of rule, and articulated a political theory of power in the thirteenth century Indian Ocean World. His second book, The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India (Harvard University Press, 2020), tells a history of the historians of the subcontinent from the tenth to the early twentieth century.

He is the co-founder of the Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanistic Research, which focuses on “mobilized humanities” and innovations in scholarly methodologies. One of the recent projects, Torn Apart/Separados focused on the humanitarian crisis on the southwestern border in Summer 2018.