Personal message:
It is my pleasure to welcome you to the website of Aga Khan University's Institute for the Study of Muslim Civlisations. These days, I am basking under the warm welcome I have received during my first weeks as the Institute's Dean in London. President Shahabuddin, Provost Amrhein, and incoming Provost Bubela have been immensely generous with their time and support as I get acquainted with AKU. The faculty and administrative staff at ISMC have gone out of their way to help me settle in. And hearing about current MA students' research projects was a highlight of the first week. It feels wonderful to be a part of AKU's thriving intellectual community.
Dedicated to research, teaching, and public engagement pertaining to Muslim contexts, ISMC is a unique institution arising out of the vision of His Highness Aga Khan IV. As a part of AKU and AKDN, ISMC is embedded in an institutional web that connects Africa, Asia, and Europe. The Institute's placement in London, in the beautiful Aga Khan Centre, makes it part of one of the most vibrant academic environments in the world. I regard it as a great honour to have been chosen to lead such an institution.
I hope to do justice to the position by working collaboratively with staff and students at ISMC and across AKU. Professor Leif Steinberg, ISMC's permanent Dean between 2017 and 2023, oversaw a process of growth and diversification whose fruits become more evident to me daily as I gather the details of the Institute's operations. I am immensely grateful to him and to all former and current faculty and staff whose achievements have laid a rock-solid foundation for the Institute's work. My mission is to build on this with the aim of making ISMC stand out all the more as a premier global academic institution. Please stay tuned to our website to learn about our faculty's ongoing and new research projects, the impact our students make around the world, and our efforts to be a voice in public discussion of Muslim contexts of the past, present, and future.
Bio
Dr. Shahzad Bashir comes to ISMC and AKU following two decades of leadership experience at universities in the United States. He has served as the Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities and Professor of History and Religious Studies at Brown University since 2017. While at Brown, Dr. Bashir directed the Center for Middle East Studies (2018-20) and established the Islam and the Humanities research project. Previously, Dr. Bashir was a faculty member at Stanford University for ten years (2007-17), serving as the Lysbeth Warren Anderson Professor in Islamic Studies and director of the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.
Dr. Bashir’s scholarly work covers Islamic history and thought in the Middle East and South and Central Asia over many centuries. He received his BA summa cum laude from Amherst College (1991) and his PhD from Yale University (1998). The author of five books and over 40 articles, Dr. Bashir’s most recent book is an Open Access multi-modal digital monograph entitled A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (MIT Press, 2022). His earlier published work has focused on understandings of time, poetry, the human body, Sufism, and Shi’ism. He is currently working in two areas: an extended argument for using anamorphic aspects of photography to theorize how we understand and narrate the past; and a cultural history of India during the period 1750-1850 deriving from a vast corpus of material that has received little attention to date. As in his previous work, Dr. Bashir’s new projects correlate between literary evidence in many languages, material culture in the form of art and the built environment, and humanistic and social scientific theories and methods.
Dr. Bashir is the recipient of numerous prestigious US academic fellowships for his work, including the American Council of Learned Societies, the Carnegie Corporation, Einstein Centre Chronoi, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Stanford Humanities Center. In 2020, he received Brown University’s Presidential Faculty Award. In addition to his own research, he edits the book series Islamic Humanities (University of California Press), co-edits the series Islamicate Intellectual History (Brill), and serves as an associate editor of the flagship journal History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History.
