Tanvir Ahmed
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Mail code: 4402Campus: Tempe
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I am a historian of medieval and early modern Islam, with an interest in the Mongol Empire and its afterlives. I focus on questions of cultural history and history from below; historiography and philosophy of history; rebellion, miracles, and magic; and the connected histories of Central Asia, South Asia, and West Asia between 1200 and 1900.
My current book project explores popular uprisings against the Mongol Empire across the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. My body of scholarship includes work on the graveyards of fifteenth-century Herat (History & Theory), tales of the miraculous and strange during the 1709 uprising in Kandahar (Afghanistan), sainthood and identity in the medieval Sulayman Mountains (Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies), accusations of nonhuman origins leveled against Muslims on imperial peripheries (Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient), and other topics besides.
Ph.D. Religious Studies (Islam, Society and Culture), Brown University, 2021
M.A. Religious Studies (Islamic Studies), Stanford University, 2016
B.A. International Affairs (Middle East Studies), The George Washington University, 2014
(Refereed)
“When the Mountains Were Islands: Landing Noah’s Ark on the Shores of Afghan History,” Viator vol. 55 no. 1 (2025): 23–34.
(co-authored with Shahzad Bashir) “Abū l-Majd Tabrīzī (d. after 736/1336) on the debate between the ear and the eye,” in Islamic Sensory History, Volume 2: 600–1500, eds. Adam Bursi and Christian Lange (Brill: Leiden, 2024): 159–69.
“Demonic Descents: Contests in Islamic Tribal Etiology,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 67, no. 3-4 (2024): 401–424.
““All the world at the palm of the hand”: imagining history through the life of an early Afghan saint,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies vol. 87, no. 1 (2024): 151–67.
“Miraculous Edges of Rebellion: On the Strange History of Ḥājjī Mīr Khān,” Afghanistan, vol. 6 no. 2 (2023): 107–124.
“Green Boughs on the Graves: Unmooring Herat from Imperial Time,” History & Theory, vol. 62, issue 3 (2023): 367–385.
(Editor-Refereed)
“Churchill’s Heresiography: On the Epistemological Anarchies of 19th-Century Malakand,” Afghanistan vol. 7 no. 2 (2024): 134–9.
“As Mīr Ways Khān slept: miraculous possibilities in Afghan history,” Edinburgh University Press Blog, 17 May 2024.
“The Unyielding Dead: Interring Conquest in the Graves of God’s Friends,” Study of Islam in Central Eurasia, Austrian Academy of Sciences, 20 March 2023.
Courses
2025 Fall
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| HST 303 | Studies in Asian History |
| HST 100 | Global History to 1500 |
| HST 590 | Reading and Conference |