People: Affiliate Faculty

Amara Ali

Lecturer of Urdu in South and Southeast Asian Studies

Amara Ali is a Lecturer in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies. Her research centers on the interplay of Urdu, Hindi, and Kashmiri literary traditions and Islam in South Asia. Her doctoral dissertation provided a literary examination of the Kashmiri marsiya (an elegiac poem), analyzing how this local form articulates a unique Kashmiri aesthetic, while remaining in critical dialogue with the broader Urdu, Persian, and Arabic literary traditions. Earlier, she completed her master's studies at the University of Cambridge, focusing on the celebrated...

Abhishek Kaicker

Associate Professor of History
Abhishek Kaicker is a historian of Persianate South Asia (c. 1200-1900) with focus on the history of the Mughal empire. He is interested in questions of intellectual history and the history of concepts; early modern global history; religion, politics and the city; and more generally in the continuities between precolonial and postcolonial south Asia. Professor Kaicker's first book, The King the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi (OUP 2020) shows how ordinary urbanites emerged as assertive political subjects in the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi)...

Owen Cornwall

Visiting Scholar of South and Southeast Asian Studies

Owen Cornwall is an intellectual historian of premodern Persian and Persianate cultures. Since 2017, he has been a lecturer in World Literatures, Religion, and Classics Departments at Tufts University. He is the co-author with Frances W. Pritchett of Ghalib: Selected Poems and Letters (Columbia University Press, 2018). He is currently a Visiting Scholar in the department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley, where he is completing his book project, Alexander and the Persian Cosmopolis: Persianate Humanism in the Shahnameh and Early...

Dzovinar Derderian

Assistant Adjunct Professor of Middle East and Late Modern Europe

Dzovinar Derderian is an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also directs the Armenian Studies Program. Before coming to Berkeley, she taught at the American University of Armenia and University of California, Irvine. She is a socio-cultural historian focusing on nineteenth-century Armenians in the Middle East and the Caucasus. Her interest lies in peoples at the margins of empires, and their roles in imperial processes of modernization.Her work examines discursive and...