Eurasian Studies Working Group
“Comparing Regimes of Colonial Knowledge in Afghanistan, 1809-2009”
Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, Ass’t. Professor of History, James Madison UniversityThursday, May 28th, 4:00 pm
Encina Hall West, Room 208
Co-sponsored by the Department of History
This talk compares the nineteenth-century British Indian and twenty-first century American engagements of Afghanistan. The comparison centers on the Pashto language, specifically how the British and Americans deployed individuals, developed technologies, and created institutions to engage the Pashto language and its speakers. The foci in the nineteenth-century period are the career of Henry George Raverty, the Baptist Missionary Press in Calcutta, and the British Indian military language exam system. The twenty-first century foci are the legacy of Louis Dupree, computer-based language-learning technologies, and the Defense Language Institute in Monterey. Thematic concerns across both periods include multilingualism, orality vs. literacy, and printing. The broadest comparative tent covering this talk would be hoisted upon the tension generated between new forms of colonialism and pre-existing forms of local language interaction.
Shah Mahmoud Hanifi (Assistant Professor, B.A. University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ph.D. University of Michigan) teaches courses on the history of the modern Middle East and South Asia in the History Department and in the General Education Program. He is the Coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Minor in Middle Eastern Communities and Migrations.
His publications include Connecting Histories in Afghanistan (Columbia University Press, 2008); "Material and Social Remittances to Afghanistan" (Asian Development Bank, 2006); and "Impoverishing a Colonial Frontier" (Iranian Studies, 2004). Click here for links to these publications in electronic form.
Dr. Hanifi has received grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, the American Historical Association, the Asian Development Bank, and JMU for research conducted in Australia, Europe, North America, and South Asia.
Shah Mahmoud Hanifi is the author of Connecting Histories in Afghanistan that is available at: http://www.gutenberg-e.org/hanifi/index.html