Alison Shah
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2005
Teaching
I teach courses in South Asian history, history of the Islamic world, and thematic seminars such as “Textiles and Trade in the Pre-modern World” and “Monuments and Memory.” Students in my classes work with diverse visual, material, and textual sources for historical inquiry, and work on assignments that develop their sense of authorship as well as their fluency in historical analysis. My courses aim to teach students broadly professional skills by drawing out the specific issues that face historians.
Research Interests
My interests lie in exploring the ways that groups deploy cultural heritage to ground new social movements. I focus on the political uses of pre-modern Islamic culture in modern India, and the changing ways that groups in Indian cities engage with this broad field of cultural heritage. My dissertation research examined the changes in the built environment of the Muslim-led, Princely State of Hyderabad (1724-1948) to document how the rituals and forms that have come to define this city’s timeless Islamic culture were developed strategically by urban elites as they struggled to negotiate the transitions from pre-modern institutions and patterns of organization to the modern ones that transformed urban and political life in South Asia. Hyderabad’s Indo-Islamic culture provides a prism to explore issues in religious identity, urbanism, and the fractures and flows of tradition that shaped modernity.
I am currently working on a book project titled, “Islam and The Politics of Heritage in Urban India, 1800-2000.” Using as a lens the dynamic social and political environments of modern Hyderabad, India, I explore how groups of urban elites in this multi-religious society have continually chosen to shape their city’s development through the patronage of pre-modern Islamic cultural forms and practices, well beyond the end of the Muslim-led Princely State. Focusing on the patronage of traditional institutions and the networks forged from uncolonized environments, I aim to highlight how urban patterns of mobility and cultural memory cross-cut Princely and British India, colonial and post-colonial identities, “Muslim” and “Hindu” regimes, as well as current national and urban politics. Working across such divides offers broad scope for thinking about the ways religion and heritage anchor the political life of history and identity in South Asia today.
Preservation Studies
I am also a faculty member at the Center of Preservation Research (CoPR) in the College of Architecture and Planning. My current interests there are directed toward the possibilities of using digital preservation as a tool for reconstructing lost and radically transformed cultural landscapes. I am developing a digital project on historic monuments and shifting urban environments in Hyderabad, India for MIT’s ArchNet website. I have also worked on more traditional conservation and documentation projects. For my dissertation, I created a detailed, 200-page catalogue documenting and analyzing over sixty heritage buildings in Hyderabad patronized between 1724-1948. And as part of a project funded by the Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture in the mid-1990s, I surveyed and mapped the residential fabric in the historic districts of the Central Asian cities of Samarkand and Bukhara.
Publications and Recent Conference Presentations
“The Patronage Projects of Nizam Afzal ud Daulah: Architecture, Urban Space, and the Re-Scripting of Hyderabad’s Urban Heritage, 1858-1868,” in al-Jayussi, Holod, Pettruccioli, and Raymond, eds., The City in the Islamic World, Leiden: E.J. Brill, Forthcoming 2008.
“Baba Farid’s Door in a New Dargah: The Politics of Charisma and Saintly Heritage in Princely Hyderabad,” AAS Annual Conference, Atlanta, April 2008.
“Islamic Inheritance and the Quest for an Urban Identity in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh,” Conference on South Asia, Madison, October 2007.
“Palaces, Princes, and the Politics of Allegiance in Late Nineteenth-Century Hyderabad”, the American Council of Southern Asian Art Bi-Annual Symposium, San Francisco, March 2007.
“Mapping Space, Mapping Identity: Imagining Hyderabad’s Walled City in the 19th Century,” Marg, vol. 56, no. 1, Sept. 2004, pp. 50-59.