Mahdi Chowdhury

Mahdi Chowdhury is a PhD candidate in History at Harvard University. His doctoral research charts two centuries of steam-powered Islamic mobility across the maritime domains of the British Indian Empire. Between Suez to Aden to Calcutta, imperialism left unintended infrastructures of communication, assembly, discourse, sentiment, and resistance for colonial Muslims. Consulting archives in South Asia, the Gulf, and the United Kingdom, his dissertation foregrounds the subjectivities of Indian Ocean Muslims and places them within the entangled contexts of new imperialism, infrastructure, and global capitalism.

Chowdhury received his B.A. at the University of Toronto and his MPhil in World History at the University of Cambridge, where he was the recipient of the Cambridge Centre of Islamic Studies’ Studentship. Beyond the academy, he has written pieces for The New Inquiry, Popula, Jadaliyya, Asia Art Archive, etc, on a diverse range of topics, from film history to art criticism to Islamic philosophy.