Graduate Student, Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Thesis Title: Migrants, Monikers and Manners: Contours of Community in the Persianate World, 1722-1835
Afsaneh Najmabadi
Engseng Ho
Sunil Sharma
About
I am interested in the early modern and modern social and cultural history of the links between Western, Central and South Asia. The dissertation I am currently working on explores the migration and cultural exchange between these regions in an attempt to make sense of what being from a place meant before the rise of nationalism, in the context of a fracturing Persianate world. My chapters cover such things as the meaning of the fall of the Safavids for migrants and travelers between Iran and Mughal India, the importance of origin, the meaning of geography, the construction of parochial differences and the negotiation of those differences through an ethics of social comportment.
My next project will look at the ways in which 18th and early 19th century modes of interactions under went change during the mid-19th to early 20th century due to pressures of empire and nation. I spent last year gathering the majority of this research in London, Tehran, Delhi, Yangon and Mandalay.
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