DEPARTMENT OF ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES

Research Areas:

South Asian Literature and History (Pakistan and India), Islam in South Asia and the Indian Ocean, Urdu and Hindi Language and Literature, Travel Writing, Mobility, Global History, Translation

About me:

My work is committed to thinking about South Asia and its place in the world as it is envisaged, imagined, and expressed through the medium of language and literature. I am particularly interested in the history and culture of Muslims and Islam in South Asia, with a special emphasis on Urdu literature, travel writing, popular culture, and language politics. I teach a range of courses on these and related topics.

I am co-director of the South Asia Research Forum and a Kaplan-funded research workshop called The Language of Islam. Beyond Northwestern, I am vice-president of the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, and a board member of the Modern Endangered Archives Program. 

My current book project, Hindi: A Global History, asks what it might mean to become a citizen of the world through the medium of a subaltern language of the global South. Hindi today claims an estimated 850 million speakers, slightly more than half of whom speak it as a second language. This makes it the third most commonly used language on earth (behind only English and Mandarin Chinese), with more speakers than Spanish and Arabic combined. Like these languages, Hindi is not, and has never been, only a regional or a diasporic language. And yet, if you do not speak the language yourself, you will be hard pressed to realize its ubiquity. Hindi: A Global History tells the story of Hindi’s global past to ask if what might it mean to be global without English.

My publish work to date focuses on the history of travel writing in South Asia and, more broadly, across the Muslim world. My first monograph was The World in Words: Travel Writing and the Global Imagination in Muslim South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2023), a study of South Asia’s global imagination as it was expressed in Urdu-language travel writing from 1840 to the present. This book argues that travel writing in South Asia was a broadly ecumenical genre that let Indian travelers not just describe the world as they found it, but to imagine it as they wished for it to be. 

My second book was Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women (Indiana University Press, 2022), which I co-wrote and edited with Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and Sunil Sharma. The recipient of a three-year grant from the Leverhulme Foundation, it argues that travel was a key site at which Muslim women negotiated their relationship to Islam and the Muslim community and contains original studies of travel accounts, including translated excerpts, by forty-five women authors written in twelve languages.

My third book tells the fascinating life story of Begum Sarbuland Jung, an influential Muslim woman who lived at the very heart of one India’s wealthiest kingdoms, but who never herself stepped into the spotlight. A Journey to Mecca and London: The Travels of an Indian Muslim Woman, 1909–1910 (Indiana University Press, 2025) provides the first full English translation of Begum Sarbuland's nearly-lost Urdu travel diary of a journey to the Middle East and Europe. As Begum Sarbuland met other women and Muslims during her travels, those encounters shaped her reassessment of her own identity as a Muslim woman. I have also published a second book in Urdu connected to this project called Dunya ‘Aurat kī Nazar meñ: Mashiq o Maghrib kā Safarnāma ma‘ muqaddama, Havāshi, Zamīme (Dilli Kitab Ghar, 2025) that further expands my engagement with Begum Sarbuland’s writing and wider milieu.

I have also published articles and translations in a range of academic journals and edited volumes. Most recently, I completed an e-book on the Urdu script entitled Zer o Zabar, also co-written with David Boyk. I have also completed a translation of collection of supernatural short stories by acclaimed Urdu writers Qazi Abdul Ghaffar in collaboration with my colleague David Boyk. The translation will be published in 2026 under the title The Ajeeb Society.

Books

 A Journey to Mecca and London: The Travels of an Indian Muslim Woman, 1909-1910.
Indiana University Press, 2025.

The World in Words: Travel Writing and the Global Imagination in Muslim South Asia. Cambridge University Press, 2023.

 Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women.  Co-edited with Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and Sunil Sharma. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. 

A Long Way from Hyderbad: Diary of a Young Muslim Woman in 1930s Britain. Muhammadi Begum; tr. Zehra Ahmad and Zainab Masud; ed. Kulsoom Husein; introduction, Daniel Majchrowicz. New Delhi, Primus Books, 2022.  

E-Books

Zer o Zabar: An Introduction to the Urdu Script. With David Boyk. 2023.

Selected Articles

“‘Can’t Touch This’: Early Indian Muslim Responses to the Saudi Conquest of the Hijaz.” Journal of Urdu Studies 3, no. 1 (2023): 63–87.

“Muslim Women Travellers from South Asia to Britain, c. 1890s to 1940s.” With Siobhan Lambert-Hurley. In Muslim Women in Britain, c. 1860s to 1960s, ed. Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor and Jamie Gilham. London, Hurst Publishing, 2023.

 “Begum Hasrat Mohani’s Journey to Iraq,” in Worlds of Knowledge in Women’s Travel Writing. Ed. James Uden. Boston, Ilex (Harvard University Press), 2022.

“Malika Begum’s Mehfil: Retrieving the Lost Legacy of Women’s Travel Writing in Urdu,” in the South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, October 2020.

“Fingernails Torn from Flesh: Intiz̤ār Ḥusain, Rām La‘l, and Travel Writing across the India-Pakistan Border” in the Journal of Urdu Studies, October 2020.