Manan Ahmed Asif

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.[2] At Chicago, Asif studied under Muzaffar Alam, Fred Donner, and Ronald Inden.[3]

Asif's work often combines archaeological, numismatic, epigraphic, and literary evidence and focuses on the history of South Asia.[4]

According to Asif, Muslim presence in the continent is not to be understood as a history of conquests or Manichean conflict (religious, military, etc). Asif, 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.[5]

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 data visualizations, responded to the Trump administration family separation policy announced by the United States government in 2018.[6][7] The project located 113 shelters used to house children separated from their parents at the Mexico-United States Border.[8][9]

• 2016 A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia. Harvard University Press; ISBN 0-6746-6011-0 (10); ISBN 978-0-67466-011-3 (13).
• 2011 Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and the American Imagination. Just World Publications; ISBN 1-9359-8206-0 (10); ISBN 978-1-93598-206-7 (13).