Editorial Board
Editor in Chief
David Ludden
is Professor Emeritus of History and South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Professor of History at New York University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978, and he served on the Penn faculty from 1981 until 2007, before moving to NYU. Ludden has chaired South Asia programs at Penn, NYU, Fulbright, American Council of Learned Societies, and Social Science Research Council (SSRC). He has served as President of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS). He has published three monographs on South Asian History and dozens of peer reviewed articles and chapters, and also edited four scholarly volumes and translated a collection of ancient Tamil poems. The breadth of his scholarship includes serious studies of ancient, medieval, and early-modern history, as well as deep research into modern history and contemporary economic and social development.
Editorial Board
Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer
Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer is an assistant professor of History at New York University. Her area of expertise is early modern Ottoman and Safavid Empires. Her publications examine empire formation in the Middle East and its enmeshment with sectarian, geo-political, and fiscal issues, particularly in inter-confessional and inter-imperial contact zones such as Anatolia, Kurdistan, and western Iran. She has been awarded fellowships by the Institute for Advanced Study, NYU’s Center for Humanities, and Bradley Foundation. She is currently completing her monograph, tentatively titled Politics of Sectarianism in the Early Modern Middle East: Ottoman Sunnism, Safavid Shiism, and the Qizilbash.
Ayesha Jalal
has been a professor at Tufts University since 1999. Since 2003, she has held a joint appointment at the History Department and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and is also currently the holder of the Mary Richardson chair. After double majoring in history and political science from Wellesley College in 1978, she received her doctorate in history from the University of Cambridge in 1983. She was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge (1980–84), Leverhulme Fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge (1984–87), Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, DC (1985–86) and Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies (1988–90). Between 1998 and 2003, Ayesha Jalal was a MacArthur Fellow. She specializes in Modern South Asian History, post-independence Pakistan, and Islam in Asia.
Tatiana Linkhoeva
is Assistant Professor of Japanese History at New York University. Her book, Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union, was published by Cornell University Press in 2020. Her current research examines colonial policies by the Soviet and Japanese regimes on the Mongolian territories (Buriatia, Outer and Inner Mongolia). A native of the republic of Buriatia (Russia), Dr. Linkhoeva graduated from Moscow State University, received her MA from the University of Tokyo, and was awarded her PhD in Japanese History from the University of California, Berkeley. She has been awarded fellowships from Japan’s Ministry of Education, the Japan Foundation, UC Berkeley, and the German Excellence Initiative for postdoctoral research at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany.
Scott Levi
is Associate Professor of Central Asian History at the Ohio State University. His work focuses on the social and economic history of early modern Central Asia in the broader context of Islamic and world history. In addition to his articles and book chapters, he has published a number of books. These include, The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and its Trade, 1550–1900 (E. J. Brill, 2002), Islamic Central Asia: An Anthology of Historical Sources (Indiana UP, 2010, co-edited with Ron Sela), and most recently, Caravans: Indian Merchants on the Silk Road (Penguin, 2015). He is currently at work on another book project, Central Asia on the Frontier of Empires: The Rise and Fall of Khoqand, 1709–1876.
Advisory Board
Amiya Kumar Bagchi
is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata in India. He is interested in finance, human development issues and other aspects of development, as well as the prospects of democracy in a globalizing world. He is the author of many works, including Colonialism and Indian Economy (New Delhi: OUP, 2010) and his co-edited volume, Transformation and Development: The Political Economy of Transition in India and China, with Anthony P. D Costa (New Delhi: OUP, 2012). His most recent co-edited volume is, with Amita Chatterjee, Marxism with and beyond Marx (Routledge, 2014).
Michael W. Charney
is Professor of Asian and Military History at SOAS, the University of London. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1999 with a dissertation on the emergence of religious communalism in early modern Rakhine, was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies at the National University of Singapore working on religion and migration in modern East and Southeast Asia, and then joined the History Department at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He has published monographs on warfare in the early modern South East Asian region (Southeast Asian Warfare, 1300–1900, 2004), the rise of monastic, military, and ministerial elites and their impact on the religious and intellectual life of the precolonial Burmese kingdom (Powerful Learning: Buddhist Literati and the Throne in Burma's Last Dynasty, 1752–1885, 2006), a history of the twentieth century in Burma before and during the lengthy period of military rule (A History of Modern Burma, 2009), and the role of the railways in the Burma Campaign (Imperial Military Transportation in British Asia: Burma 1941–1942, 2018, in press). He has also co-edited four volumes, the most recent with Kathryn Wellen on early modern South East Asian warfare (Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asia. Local Cultures of Conflict within a Regional Context 2017).
Prasenjit Duara
is the Oscar Tang Professor of East Asian Studies in the Department of History at Duke University. He previously served as the Raffles Professor of Humanities at the National University of Singapore, holding a simultaneous appointment in the History Department.
Peter Golden
is Professor Emeritus of History, Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University. His research areas are the history of medieval Eurasia and the interaction of the Turko-Mongolian steppe peoples with the neighboring sedentary states (Rus', Byzantium, the Caucasus, and the Islamic world), ethnogenesis, and Turkic philology. Golden is most recently the author of Central Asia in World History (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet
is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead Scholar. She received her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in history at Yale University. Her research and writing focus on frontier history of Iran and its borderlands; nationalism, ethnicity, and state formation; Ottoman-Iranian relations; Iranian-Afghan relations; social history of hygiene, women’s and gender history; and U.S.-Islamic relations. Her book Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran (Oxford University Press, 2011), received the 2012 book award from the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies for outstanding scholarship in the field of Middle East gender studies. She spent the 2015–16 academic year at the Institute for Advanced Study's School of Social Science in Princeton, New Jersey participating in the School's designated theme, "Borders and Boundaries." She has been the Director of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania since 2006.
Aruna P. Magier
is South Asia Librarian at New York University Library, and Associate Editor for South Asia of the Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS), published by the Association for Asian Studies. She received her Ph.D. in History from Osmania University (Hyderabad) in 1999, with a research focus on Indian economic history, and a Masters in Library Science from Queens College in 2004. She has served on the faculty at Rutgers University (2009), Columbia University (2005–2010), and University of Pennsylvania (2006–2010). She began her work as Associate Editor of the BAS in 2000, and since 2008 has been the South Asia Librarian on the faculty at NYU's Bobst Library, shaping the University's interdisciplinary print and digital research collections and primary sources from and about South Asia and the region's global connections, and creating broad South Asian Studies online research guides to assist students and scholars working in this field. At NYU, she has also created the South Asian Documentary Films Collection. She is currently writing up her research on foodways in the Asian diaspora. A trained oral historian, she is also working on oral histories as primary source documentation of the history of diasporic South Asian women's organizations and LGBTQ immigrant communities in the New York area.
Beatrice Manz
is Chair and Professor of History in the Department of History at Tufts University. Her major period of research has been the Timurid dynasty (1370–1506) and has written on the topic two books, The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane (Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Power Politics and Religion in Timurid Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Currently, she is writing a book on the history of nomads in the Middle East from the rise of Islam to the present
Prasannan Parthasarathi
is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the History Department of Boston College. He teaches courses on modern South Asia, global history, and environmental history. He is now engaged in a study of environmental change, agriculture, and labor in nineteenth-century South India. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Dibner Institute and the American Council for Learned Societies. He is a senior editor of International Labor and Working Class History and serves on the editorial boards of a number of journals including Textile History, the Medieval History Journal, and the American Historical Review
Anthony Reid
is Emeritus Professor, School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University College of the Pacific. He was a member of ANU's former Department of Pacific & Asian History from 1970 1999, after an initial position teaching Southeast Asian History at the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur (1965–70). In 1999 he became founding Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UCLA, Los Angeles, and in 2001 founding Director of the Asia Research Institute of NUS in Singapore. He retired to Canberra in 2009, though accepting visiting positions at the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University (2009-10), and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2012–13).He was honoured with the Fukuoka Prize for Asian Culture (Academic) in 2002 and the Life Achievement Award of the Association of Asian Studies in 2011. He has been a member of the Australian Academy of Humanities since 1987 and the British Academy since 2008.
Tansen Sen
is Professor in the Department of History at NYU Shanghai. He received his M.A. from Peking University and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in Asian history and religions and has special scholarly interests in India-China interactions, Indian Ocean trade, Buddhism, and Silk Road archeology. He has done extensive research in India, China, Japan, and Singapore with grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Japan Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (Singapore).
Mrinalini Sinha
is the Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of History and Literature at the University of Michigan. She is the co-editor of the book series Critical Perspectives on Empire, published by Cambridge University Press. Her research interests include South Asia, Colonialism and Imperialism, and Women's Studies.
Nhung Tran
Nhung Tuyet Tran is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto. Trained in Chinese legal history at the University of Pennsylvania and Southeast Asian social history at UCLA, Tran’s intellectual interests lie at the intersection of gender, law, and religion in early modern Vietnam. Her first book, Vietnam: Borderless Histories (Wisconsin 2006, co-edited with Tony Reid) problematizes contemporary narratives of Vietnamese history-writing. Tran’s second book, Familial Properties: Gender, State & Society in Early Modern Vietnam, 1460–1783 (Hawai’i, 2013), which was based on her doctoral dissertation completed at UCLA, links the effects of the civil wars of the Mac-Trinh Nguyen period to women’s livelihoods in Vietnam, arguing that women’s individual strategies in times of economic need enabled them to wrestle local influence and prestige, in spite of state efforts to circumvent their influence. In addition to her research on early modern Vietnamese history, Tran is committed to public history and the relationship between the production of history and development policy. To these ends, she has collaborated with the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology on an exhibit that explores Roman Catholic culture in contemporary Vietnam (2008–09) and is currently working with the Vietnam Women’s Museum on planned historical exhibits. She has led a team of researchers for the United Nations Development Fund (UNDP) in a study that measures women’s access to land rights across ten provinces in Vietnam (2011–12).
Kären Wigen
is Professor of History and Frances and Charles Field Professor in Stanford University's Department of History. She teaches Japanese history, world history, and the history of cartography. Her research ranges from mapping the economic transformation of southern Nagano Prefecture during the height of the silk industry to exploring the roles of cartography, chorography, and regionalism in the making of modern Japan.
Past Editorial Board Members
Edward A. Alpers
is Research Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He studied African history at Harvard College and received his PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Before joining UCLA in 1968, he taught for two years at the University of Dar es Salaam; in 1980, he taught at the Somali National University as a Fulbright Senior Scholar. In 1994, he served as President of the African Studies Association (USA) (1994). His research and writing focus on international trade in Indian Ocean Africa. His major publications include Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa (1975), East Africa and the Indian Ocean (2009), and The Indian Ocean in World History (2014); he has also coedited Cross-Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian Ocean World (2007), Connectivity in Motion: Island Hubs in the Indian Ocean World (2018), and Transregional Trade and Traders: Situating Gujarat in the Indian Ocean from Early Times to c.1900 (2019).
Sunil Kumar
It is with great sadness that we must report the sudden unexpected passing of Sunil Kumar and David Washbrook—two great scholars, teachers, editors, and friends—in January 2021.
Sunil Kumar (1956–2021) studied the culture, society, and politics of the Central Islamic Lands and its extensions into Afghanistan, and north India specifically during the 12th through the 16th centuries. His research was primarily based on Persian literary materials, coins, architecture, and field archaeology. His early work involved the political culture and the social construction of authority and its diverse representations during the 13th and 14th century Delhi Sultanate. Later, his writing focused on the history of a Muslim urban center in north India (13–16th century), reading it largely from the perspective of micro-history. He was Professor in the Department of History, Delhi University, and held visiting positions at LMU Munich, SOAS London, UC Berkeley, EHESS and EPHE Paris. His authored monographs include The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate and The Present in Delhi’s Past.
Peter C. Perdue
is Professor of History at Yale University. He has taught courses on East Asian history and civilization, Chinese social and economic history, the Silk Road, and historical methodology. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His first book, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500–1850 A.D. (Harvard University Press, 1987), examined long-term agricultural change in one Chinese province. His second book, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Harvard University Press, 2005), discusses environmental change, ethnicity, long-term economic change and military conquest in an integrated account of the Chinese, Mongolian, and Russian contention over Siberia and Central Eurasia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is a coeditor of two books on empires: Imperial Formations, (SAR Press, 2007) and Shared Histories of Modernity, (Routledge, 2008), and a co-author of Global Connections, a world history textbook forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, and Asia Inside Out, three volumes on inter-Asian connections forthcoming from Harvard University Press. His current research focuses on Chinese frontiers, Chinese environmental history, and the history of tea.
Dietmar Rothermund
Dietmar Rothermund (1933–2020) was Professor Emeritus of South Asian History at Heidelberg University. He received the Federal Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2011.
serves as Professor of Modern Asian History at the University of Amsterdam and the International Institute of Social History. His research interests include borderland societies, unauthorised flows of goods and people, labour relations, area studies, commodity histories, identity formation and historical photography. Recent books include The Camera as Witness: A Social History of Mizoram, Northeast India (Cambridge UP 2015, co-authored), The Bangladesh Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke UP 2013, co-edited), Labour Migration and Human Trafficking in Southeast Asia (Routledge 2012, co-edited), and A History of Bangladesh (Cambridge UP 2009).
Richard Von Glahn
is Professor at UCLA's Department of History. His primary field of research is the economic and social history of premodern China, with a particular focus on the period 1000–1700. His publications include three monographs in Chinese history, several edited books, and a co-authored textbook in world history. He continues to pursue research in Chinese monetary history, especially the interrelationship between China’s monetary system and wider spheres of monetary circulation within Asia and on a global scale.
David Washbrook
David Washbrook (1948–2021) was a member of the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford. He specialized in the history of Southern India between the 18th and 20th centuries as well as International, Imperial and Global History. Prior to his position at the University of Oxford, he was a Research Professor in South Asian History at Trinity College, University of Cambridge.