Manan Ahmed Asif, commonly known as Manan Ahmed, is a historian of South Asia and West Asia, who works as an associate professor at the

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. He is the founder of the

South Asia South Asia is the southern subregion of Asia, which is defined in both geographical and ethno-cultural terms. The region consists of the countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.;;;;;;;; ...

blog ''Chapati Mystery'' and co-founder o
Columbia's Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research

Career

Ahmed holds a BA from

Punjab University, Lahore The University of the Punjab (Urdu, pnb, ), also referred to as Punjab University, is a public, research, coeducational higher education institution located in Lahore, Pakistan. Punjab University is the oldest public university in Pakistan. ...

and a second from

Miami University Miami University (informally Miami of Ohio or simply Miami) is a public research university in Oxford, Ohio. The university was founded in 1809, making it the second-oldest university in Ohio (behind Ohio University, founded in 1804) and the 10 ...

in Ohio. Ahmed earned a PhD from the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

in 2008. At Chicago, Ahmed studied under

Muzaffar Alam Muzaffar Alam (born 3 February 1947) is the George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Biography Muzaffar Alam is a historian trained at Jamia Millia Islamia (New Delhi), Aligarh Mu ...

, Fred Donner, and

Ronald Inden __NOTOC__ Ronald B. Inden is a professor emeritus in the Departments of History and of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago and is a major scholar in South Asian and post-colonial studies. Inden has been a lifelong ...

. Ahmed's work often combines archaeological, numismatic, epigraphic, and literary evidence and focuses on the history of

. According to Ahmed, Muslim presence in the subcontinent is not to be understood as a history of conquests or Manichean conflict (religious, military, etc.). Ahmed, argues instead, that we recognize that presence as “lived spaces” (A Book 49), interconnected with each other across the region, and full of particularities that must be understood in their own terms. In 2014, he helped co-foun
Columbia's Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research
which focuses on “mobilized humanities” and innovations in scholarly methodologies. One of the recent projects, ''Torn Apart/Separados,'' a series of rapidly produced

data visualization Data and information visualization (data viz or info viz) is an interdisciplinary field that deals with the graphic representation of data and information. It is a particularly efficient way of communicating when the data or information is num ...

s, responded to the

Trump administration family separation policy The United States family separation policy under the Trump administration was presented to the public as a "zero tolerance" approach intended to deter illegal immigration and to encourage tougher legislation. In some cases, families followi ...

announced by the United States government in 2018. The project located 113 shelters used to house children separated from their parents at the Mexico-United States Border.

Works

* 2016 ''A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia''.

Harvard University Press Harvard University Press (HUP) is a publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University, and focused on academic publishing. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses. After the retirem ...

; (10); (13). * 2011 ''Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and the American Imagination''. Just World Publications; (10); (13). * 2020 ''The Loss of Hindustan''. HUP/Harper Publications;.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ahmed, Manan American academics of Pakistani descent Living people 21st-century American historians 21st-century American male writers 1971 births Columbia University faculty American male non-fiction writers