Shahzad Bashir is named a 2015 Carnegie Fellow

Professor Shahzad Bashir (Religious Studies) receives one of the 31 inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellowships.

His book project, tentatively titled Building the Past: Memory, Metaphor, and Reality in Islamic Narratives, seeks to illustrate constructions of time and human experience in a wide-ranging set of materials produced in Persianate societies circa 1400-1600. This work also engages contemporary academic debates regarding language, historiography, and history on the basis of materials of Islamic provenance. “The book addresses fundamental issues with respect to understanding global Islam and is topically focused on diverse Muslim constructions of past, present and future. Conceptual issues related to this theme can allow us to appreciate Islam as an internally diverse tradition that nevertheless functions as a unifying factor in world affairs at the rhetorical level,” Bashir explained.

Professor Bashir specializes in the intellectual and social histories of Persianate societies of Iran and Central and South Asia circa fourteenth century CE to the present. His published work is concerned with the study of Sufism and Shi’ism, messianic movements originating in Islamic contexts, representation of corporeality in hagiographic texts and Persian miniature paintings, religious developments during the Timurid and Safavid periods, and modern transformations of Islamic societies. 

The Andrew Carnegie Fellows are an exceptional group of established and emerging scholars, journalists, and authors whose work distills knowledge, enriches our culture, and equips leaders in the realms of science, law, business, public policy, and the arts. The 2015 fellowships aim to provide new perspectives on current and future challenges to U.S.  democracy andinternational order. Carnegie Corporation of New York was established in 1911 by Andrew Carnegie to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding. In keeping with this mandate, the Corporation's work focuses on the issues that Andrew Carnegie considered of paramount importance: international peace, the advancement of education and knowledge, and the strength of our democracy.