I haven’t really rolled the mental rolodex over into 2008. Something scares me about that number. It portends change, maybe dislocation, perhaps an end to the way things were. I embrace change with the same fatalism as when a human, lacking the natural means to flight, jumps out of a plane strapped to a parachute. [...]
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This past weekend, I was on a panel at the annual historian’s shindig, the AHA: Contested Pasts and Constructed Presents: Memory in the Local. It was the last panel on Sunday afternoon – colloquially termed the “Luggage Panel”. And yet, it still managed to be a good one – with up to 6 attendees! Dresner’s [...]
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On Friday, we organized a Teach-In on Pakistan at the University of Chicago, The Past and Future Emergencies in the State of Pakistan“. Alongside me were Atiya Khan, Aqil Shah, and Naim Sahib speaking on various historical and political aspects of this here crisis. We hope to have another event on campus after Thanksgiving. If [...]
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Naim Sahib forwarded a correspondence in which he answers a question about the Urdu poet and intellectual Iqbal (1877-1938). I reproduce it below without his consent. He can yell at me later: Q: I have a question for you. Attached is (supposedly) Iqbal’s Tarana-e-Hindi (The Song of India) written out in his own hand. What [...]
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Naim sahib has a scathing review in Outlook India of S.M. Azizuddin Husain’s 1857 Revisited/دستاويزاتِ غدر . The book is a compendium of 150 primary documents relating to the uprising and its aftermath, with translations and an introductory essay. A fine idea, in principle, but the problem, as Naim Sahib points out, is in the [...]
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That ‘story’ bit in history: Villemessant, the founder of Le Figaro, characterized the nature of information in a famous formulation. “To my readers,” he used to say, “an attic fire in the Latin Quarter is more important than a revolution in Madrid.” This makes strikingly clear that it is no longer intelligence coming from afar, [...]
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Seriously. How many more things can the DePaul administration do wrong? They denied tenure to Finkelstein in June expressly against the recommendations of his department and his college. And now they have cancelled his classes and re-assigned his office space – in apparent violation of AAUP rules. The mind boggles at the sheer ineptitude of [...]
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As billed, I was at the podium at 4:00, ready to change the discourse in our nation. Well, it may take a little more than that. I presented a rant-free version of the post below which tried to highlight the fallacies in Obama’s argument. My co-panelists were Juan Cole – who gave a wonderfully off-the-cuff [...]
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One of my favorite activity in the archive was to work on the marginalia of the manuscript – mostly just trying to decipher but often thinking through the gloss it ‘added’ to the text. Thinking about digital archives, I have been keenly aware that this ‘conversation on the margins’ must be incorporated into the text [...]
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I will be participating on a roundpanel, The Arc of Crisis: US Policy in the Middle East and South Asia, at YearlyKos in Chicago. It was tremendously generous of Juan Cole to invite me to join John Mearsheimer, Fariba Zarinebaf and Dennis Perrin. I will be discussing either the treaty drawn up between the East [...]
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Guest Post by Jonathan Dresner Sepoy has graciously agreed to let me guest-blog my conference experiences again, this time about South Asian studies at the Asian Studies on the Pacific Coast Conference (ASPAC). I’m a complete conference geek: I hate missing panels, and I love talking about the panels afterwards. My biggest complaint about this [...]
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Christopher Bayly, the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Director of the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge, author of several books including the seminal Empire and Information: Intelligence gathering and social communication in India 1780-1870 (1996), a doyen of the Cambridge School of [...]
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It has been all-petition-all-the-time at CM lately. Which is a marked contrast to my usual unflappably complacent demeanor but, if the shit really start to stink, one must light the fire [my grandfather used to say that and it sounds way better in Punjabi. Also, it makes more sense since cow-dung is used as fuel, [...]
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Finkelstein’s tenure denial rankles badly those of us determined to keep our visions of activist-scholarship intact in our academic careers. Are we to remain hostage to invested groups turning the screws on the ‘controversy-shy’ administration? Never. DePaul students and faculty are rallying around to protest and being threatened with expulsions and arrests – this cannot [...]
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Slate has a brilliant piece on the lolcat meme that’s sweeping the webternets these days (like a forest fire!). We were inspired by Gawker’s success in creating their own lol-meme, viz., lolgays, so we’ve created a new category of lolprofs using a special lolcat generating website. UPDATE: This just in. New Facebook group devoted totally [...]
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Haleh Esfandiari is the director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She was detained and arrested in Iran while visiting her aging mother in December and prevented from leaving the country. She was subsequently threatened, pressured, and repeatedly questioned by security authorities. Most recently, on May 8, 2007, [...]
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First it was my Dalrymple review and now, I have gone and picked on the American Historical Association. A rundown is available at Inside Higher Ed’s Inclusivity or Tokenism? by Scott Jaschik.
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In 1957, Francis S. Chase, the founding Dean of the Graduate School of Education, established at the University of Chicago the “Pakistan Education Project” with support from the Ford Foundation. The purpose of the project was to improve education through teacher-training programs at extension centers in what was then East and West Pakistan and to [...]
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I admit that I have never been a big fan of Quaid-e Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah. As a member of the “Generation Islam” of General Zia ul Haq, I have more than a passing familiarity with Jinnah’s hagiography. In the fifth grade, we read essays on how he studied after dark [he used the street [...]
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Some while ago, I wrote up my thoughts on being public intellectuals in the new digital age. I had always meant my ‘manifesto’ to serve as an introduction to a larger piece on digital history – that I would try and get published. I wrote parts of this larger piece and presented it at a [...]
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