Shaharyar Zia is a PhD candidate at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC). He got his Master’s from the Harvard Divinity School and has worked on the Partition Project with LMSAI.
He works on the tradition of Arabo-Islamic intellectual history in the Persianate Hindustan particularly focusing on 17th-19th centuries. Some of his interests include the scholarly traditions of Firangī Maḥall, Shāh Walī Allāh, Khayrabādīs and various Sufi groups amongst others. In trying to situate and analyze these pedagogical traditions, he is also interested in the wider networks that spanned and connected these scholarly traditions to the rest of the Muslim world.
Shaharyar is also interested in poetic cultures of South Asia and nuanced representations of diverse Muslim cultures (MENA and South Asia) on popular media and film.
Twitter: @ZiaShaharyar
