Islamic Studies Program

Phone:

(812) 855-6286

Email:

msdodson@indiana.edu

Department:

History

Campus:

IU Bloomington

Michael S. Dodson is a historian of South Asia, focusing particularly upon the intellectual and cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a special interest in urbanism and architecture. He is currently finishing a monograph on the urban history of northern India that focusses on the transformation of cityscapes under local municipal governance ca. 1880-1920. He is also working on a visual history of New Delhi in the 1960s and '70s as well as a general history of South Asia for Oxford University Press.

Dodson's first book, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India 1770-1880 (2007), is a reinterpretation of Orientalism that conceptualizes colonial scholarly practices in northern India as highly localized, with links not only to the East India Company's governing authority, but also to the social consolidation of scholarly "middle men," the Sanskrit pandits.

He has edited a book of essays and photographs entitled Banaras: Urban Forms and Cultural Histories (2012), and co-edited with Brian Hatcher Trans-Colonial Modernities in South Asia (2013).  He has written for journals such as Modern Asian Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Modern Intellectual History, as well as for the Indian popular press.