Professor Seema Alavi FBA

Summary

Seema Alavi is a historian based at Ashoka University in India. She is a PhD from Cambridge University and specializes in early modern and modern South Asia, with an interest in the transformation of the region’s legacy from Indo-Persian to one heavily affected by British colonial rule. She has served in prestigious academic institutions in India-the Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi, and Delhi University, Delhi, before moving to Ashoka University in 2022.

Alavi has twice been a Fulbright Scholar and a Smuts Visiting Fellow at Cambridge. She was a visiting scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard. In 2010 she was at the Radcliffe institute at Harvard as the William Bentinck-Smith Fellow.

She has written books on the military, medical and religious histories of India. These include the Albert Hourani Honorable Mention, and the Monsoon book prize winner monograph, Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the age of Empire. Her most recent book is Sovereigns of the Sea. Omani Ambition in the age of Empire, Penguin India, 2023.

She serves on the editorial board of several national and international journals, including Modern Asian Studies UK, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, UK, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, UK and Biblio, New Delhi.

She wrote 'Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India, 1770–1830' (Oxford University Press, 1995) and co-authored with Muzzafar Alam, 'A European Experience of the Mughal Orient: The I‘jaz-i Arsalani (Persian Letters 1773–1779) of Antoine-Louis Henri Polier' (Oxford University Press, 2001). Her book 'Eighteenth Century in Indian History' in the Oxford Debates series is a popular reader in India and abroad. In 2009 she wrote 'Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600–1900' (Palgrave Macmillan, UK 2009).