Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Osama Ahmad

2021-22 Cogut Collaborative Humanities Fellow, History
Last updated June 30, 2021

Biography

Osama Ahmad is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of History. His research focuses on colonial South Asia and the early-modern Persianate world, particularly the Mughal Empire. He is currently exploring the impact of colonialism on vernacular knowledge formations in the city of Lahore, Punjab under the British Raj. He is interested in examining the impact of modern colonial institutions (like colleges, art schools, and museums) and the ways it shaped ‘traditional’ educational institutions, the old ‘native’ city, the ‘Urdu bazaar,’ and vernacular fields of Urdu, Persian as well as Punjabi writing and publishing. Before coming to Brown, he received his B.A. in History from the Lahore University of Management Sciences, and an M.Phil. in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Cambridge on the Commonwealth Shared Scholarship.