Dr Faridah Zaman

I am Associate Professor of the History of Britain and the World, and Fellow and Tutor of Modern History at Somerville College.

Research Interests

• Political and intellectual history in global and imperial contexts
• The role of religion in the history of ideas
• The development of concepts around history and temporality
• Pan-Islamism and socialist internationalism

I have two main areas of research. The first concerns Muslim political activists, religious scholars, journalists and poets in early twentieth-century British India. I explore the ways in which Muslim thought developed within the context of worldwide war, political revolution and imperial decline. My work on this subject has appeared in Modern Intellectual History, South Asia, and the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. It will form the subject of my first monograph, The Young Muhammadans. My second area of research concerns the relationship between the British left, imperialism and Islam in the twentieth century. My first publication on this subject explored the place of sovereignty in socialist thought and appeared in Twentieth Century British History in 2022. To date, my work has also engaged with heritage and imperial visual culture, memory and nostalgia, travel and internationalism, and Muslim historiography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and I have written for a wider audience via the Journal of the History of Ideas blog, the Fabian Review, and History Today.

I am broadly interested in supervising research projects that develop our understanding of Britain and its relationship to the wider world since 1750, particularly concerning the history of ideas.

 Further information about my research can be found through my academia.edu profile.