Manan Ahmed Asif


Manan Ahmed Asif is a historian and professor at Columbia University in New York City. He is the founder of the South Asia blog Chapati Mystery and co-founder of .

Career

Asif holds a BA from Punjab University, Lahore and a second from Miami University in Ohio. Asif earned a PhD from the University of Chicago in 2008. At Chicago, Asif studied under Muzaffar Alam, Fred Donner, and Ronald Inden.
Asif's work often combines archaeological, numismatic, epigraphic, and literary evidence and focuses on the history of South Asia.
According to Asif, Muslim presence in the continent is not to be understood as a history of conquests or Manichean conflict. Asif, argues instead, that we recognize that presence as “lived spaces”, interconnected with each other across the region, and full of particularities that must be understood in their own terms.
In 2014, he helped co-found , which focuses on “mobilized humanities” and innovations in scholarly methodologies. One of the recent projects, Torn Apart/Separados, a series of rapidly produced data visualizations, responded to the Trump administration family separation policy announced by the United States government in 2018. The project located 113 shelters used to house children separated from their parents at the Mexico-United States Border.

Works