Seema Alavi

Seema Alavi, FBA, is a professor of history at Ashoka University, India. She was elected to the British Academy as the international fellow in 2026. She specializes in early modern and modern South Asia, with an interest in the transformation of the region’s legacy from Indo-Persian to one heavily affected by British colonial rule. She has written books on the military, medical and religious histories of India. Her most recent books are the Albert Hourani Award winner, and the 2025 Monsoon Book Award winner Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the age of Empire from Harvard University Press, USA; and Sovereigns of the Sea. Omani Ambition in the age of Empire, Penguin India, 2023.

Alavi earned her PhD from Cambridge University, England. She started her teaching career from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and before joining Ashoka University in 2023 has had long stints as a full Professor at the Jamia MilliaIslamia central university and Delhi University.

She has twice been a Fulbright Scholar and a Smuts Visiting Fellow at Cambridge and was a visiting scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard. In 2010 she was at the Radcliffe institute at Harvard as the William Bentinck-Smith Fellow.

She wrote Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India, 1770–1830 (Oxford University Press, 1995) and co-authored with Muzzafar Alam, A European Experience of the Mughal Orient: The I‘jaz-i Arsalani (Persian Letters 1773–1779) of Antoine-Louis Henri Polier (Oxford University Press, 2001). Her book Eighteenth Century in Indian History in the Oxford Debates series is a popular reader in India and abroad. In 2009 she wrote Islam and Healing : Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600–1900 (Palgrave Macmillan, UK 2009). She serves on the editorial board of several national and international journals, including Modern Asian Studies UK, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, UK, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, UK and Biblio, New Delhi.