Seema Alavi

Seema Alavi is an Indian historian. She is a professor of history at Ashoka University, India and specializes in medieval and early modern South Asia.

Career Alavi completed her doctorate in history from the University of Cambridge, and has been the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, as well as fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute, at Harvard University, and the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge. She was a professor of history at Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi, India, and has also taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Delhi. She currently teaches at Ashoka University, India. which studied the formation of the Bengal Army by the East India Company in India between 1770 and 1830. It was developed from her doctoral dissertation at Cambridge University, which was titled, North Indian military culture in transition. The book was reviewed in The Indian Economic and Social History Review by Michael H. Fisher, and in the Journal of Asian Studies, by Douglas M. Peers.

In 2001, along with historian Muzaffar Alam, she published A European Experience of the Mughal Orient: The I'jaz-i Arsalani (Oxford University Press), which was the first English translation of Persian letters written by Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier, an 18th-century Swiss adventurer and traveler. The letters were acquired by the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, which commissioned the translation from Alam and Alavi. Their translation was reviewed in Reviews in History by P. J. Marshall, and in The International History Review by Robert Travers.

In 2002, Alavi edited The Eighteenth Century in India, as part of Oxford University Press' series of Debates in Indian History and Society, consisting of key documents and debates in 18th-century Indian historiography. It contained contributions from Irfan Habib, Bernard S. Cohn, P.J. Marshall, and C.A. Bayly. The book was reviewed by Farhat Hasan in Contributions to Indian Sociology, by Projit Bihari Mukharji in Social History of Medicine, by Francis Robinson in Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, and Anne Marie Moulin in the International Journal of Asian Studies.

In 2015, Alavi published Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the age of Empire (Harvard University Press), which is a study of five Islamic scholars who were pursued by British colonial authorities after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and their work in establishing a global network of scholarship subsequently, spanning Cairo, Mecca, and Istanbul. The book received an honorable mention in the 2016 Albert Hourani Book Award, by the Middle East Studies Association.

Alavi has also published research in Modern Asian Studies, and the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History.