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Javed Majeed, MA DPhil (Oxford)
Professor
Tel: +44 (0)20 7882 8537
email: j.majeed@qmul.ac.uk
Research interests
- Intellectual history and literature of colonialism in India
- Nineteenth and twentieth-century cultural and political history of South Asia
- Islam and postcolonialism
- Linguistic ideas, language, and translation in colonial and postcolonial South Asia
Javed Majeed’s recent work focussed on the relationships between notions of selfhood, travel and politics in South Asian nationalisms. His recent publications have also addressed the role of aesthetics in postcolonial Islam. He is working on the cultural politics of lexicography in nineteenth century India and is currently writing a book on the Linguistic Survey of India, 1894-1928.
His first book, Ungoverned Imaginings. James Mill’s the History of British India and Orientalism (Clarendon Press, 1992) addressed the relationship between aesthetics, politics and culture in British attitudes to India with particular reference to the work of Sir William Jones, Robert Southey, Thomas Moore and James Mill. He has also co-edited a critical edition of a culturally influential epic Urdu poem (OUP, 1997).
He is on the editorial board of Modern Intellectual History and History Compass, and is one of the three editors of the Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Intellectual and Cultural History series, published from New York. He was awarded a British Academy Research Leave Fellowship for 2006-08.
Publications since 2000
Books
Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism (Routledge, 2008)
Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity. Nehru, Gandhi and Iqbal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
Articles
‘Islamic Hellenism and Selfhood in the Poetry and Thought of Muhammad Iqbal’, Moving Worlds. A Journal of Transcultural Writings, 8:1, Special Issue on ‘Exploring Muslim Culture’ (May 2008) 46-58.
‘Geographies of Subjectivity, Pan-Islam and Muslim separatism: Muhammad Iqbal and Selfhood’, special issue on ‘An Intellectual History for India’, Modern Intellectual History, 4, 1 (2007) 145-61.
‘“The Bad Habit”: Hobson-Jobson, British Indian glossaries, and intimations of mortality’, Bulletin of the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas, special issue on ‘Colonialism and Linguistic Thought’, 46-47 (2006) 7-22.
‘Gandhi, “Truth” and Translatability’, Modern Asian Studies, 40, 2 (May 2006) 303-32.
'James Mill’s The History of British India: the question of Utilitarianism and empire’, in Classical Utilitarianism and the Questions of Race and Empire, ed. George Varouxakis and Bart Schultz (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2005) 93-105.
‘Bathos, architecture and knowing India: E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Nineteenth-Century British Ethnology and the Romance Quest’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 40, 1 (March 2005) 21-36.
‘Islam and modernity’, for the Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World, ed. S.A. Arjomand et al (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2003) 3 vols., 2: 456-58.
‘Narratives of Progress and Idioms of Community: Two Urdu Periodicals of the 1870s’, in Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century media, ed. David Finkelstein and Douglas M. Peers (New York: St. Martin’s Press and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000) 135-163.
'Beyond Europe: a workshop. Themes, issues, problems’, Guest Editor, Comparative Criticism. East and West: Comparative Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) xxix-xxxiii.
Review essays
‘Being Middle Class in South Asia’, Review of Markus Daechsel, The politics of self-expression (London and New York: Routledge, 2006) in History Workshop Journal, 65 (Spring 2008) 247-52.
‘Literary Cultures in history: the case of South Asia’, review of Sheldon Pollock ed., Literary cultures in History. Reconstructions of South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), in History Compass, 3 (2005) 1-13.
'Aryanism and Empire’, review of Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race. Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002), in History Workshop Journal, 58 (Autumn 2004) 312-6.
