Manan Ahmed Asif

Manan Ahmed Asif historian and associate professor at Columbia University in New York City. He is the founder of the South Asia blog Chapati Mystery and co-founder of Columbia's Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research. 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. At Chicago, Asif studied under Muzaffar Alam, Fred Donner, and Ronald Inden. Asif's work often combines archaeological, numismatic, epigraphic, and literary evidence and focuses on the history of South Asia. 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