Manan Ahmed Asif

Manan Ahmed Asif, also known as Manan Ahmed, is a Pakistani historian of South Asia and West Asia. He is an associate professor of history at Columbia University in New York City.^[1]

He is the founder of the South Asia blog Chapati Mystery^[2] and co-founder of Columbia's Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research.^[3] Since 2021, he is co-executive editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas.^[4]

Ahmed was born in 1971 in

Ahmed's work often combines archaeological, numismatic, epigraphic, and literary evidence and focuses on the history of South Asia.^[14]

According to Ahmed, Muslim presence in the subcontinent is not to be understood as a history of conquests or Manichean conflict (religious, military, etc.). Ahmed argues instead, that we recognize that presence as “lived spaces” (A Book 49), interconnected with each other across the region, and full of particularities that must be understood in their own terms.^[15]

In 2014, he helped co-found Columbia's Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research, which focuses on “mobilized humanities” and innovations in scholarly methodologies. One of the recent projects, Torn Apart/Separados, a series of rapidly produced

• 2016 A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia.
  ISBN 978-0-67466-011-3
  (13).
• 2011 Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and the American Imagination. Just World Publications;
  ISBN 978-1-93598-206-7
  (13).
• 2020 The Loss of Hindustan. HUP/Harper Publications;
  ISBN 978-0-67498-790-6
  .