I am the Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities and Professor of History and Religious Studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. I also serve as an associate editor of the journal History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History.
My most recent book is A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures, a digital publication whose custom-designed interface performs the argument it is presenting. My earlier published work has been concerned with temporality, poetry, the study of Sufism and Shi’ism, messianic movements originating in Islamic contexts, and religious representations of corporeality.
I am currently developing a major research project on the vast corpus of multilingual literature produced in India during the period 1750-1850 that has received little attention and remains almost entirely in manuscript. Authors represented in this material amalgamate ideas of European, Indian, and Islamic provenance to theorize global history. Tentatively entitled “Seeing from India: An Alternative Genealogy for Modern History”, this project correlates between literary evidence, art, and the built environment. I hope to present the past as a human intellectual, social, and moral concern in a perspective that looks beyond the universalizing hegemony of modern European ideas.