ERIC LEWIS BEVERLEY

Associate Professor (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2007)

Curriculum vitae

Office: SBS S-359

Email: eric.beverley@stonybrook.edu

Interests: Modern & Early Modern South Asia; Urban History; Indian Ocean; Transregional & Comparative History; Muslim World; British Empire; Sovereignty; Law & Crime; Borderlands

My research explores global connections through detailed examination of particular cities, states, places, and networks. Centered on modern and early modern South Asia and the Indian Ocean world, my scholarship attends to historical links with other places (European Empires, Muslim states and populations), and key themes in global contexts (cities, sovereignty, law and crime; circulation of people, ideas, and capital). Beyond the university, I have served on the Board of Directors of the Global Urban History Projects (2025-2027), the Board of Trustees of the American Institute of Indian Studies (2022-2025), and the Editorial Board of the journal Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

My first book, Hyderabad, British India, and the World: Muslim Networks and Minor Sovereignty, c. 1850-1950 (Cambridge 2015; Delhi 2016) viewed the world from Hyderabad, a minor South Asian state under sovereign Muslim rule. The work sketched eclectic global circuits that informed political experimentation in political ideology and diplomacy, frontier legal administration, and urban development. The book redefined the nature of state sovereignty in the era of colonialism, and identified entanglement of Muslim rule and political modernity in Hyderabad.

My current work continues to examine South Asian cities, borderlands, and transregional connections from the early modern period to the present, and includes projects on urban history, global Muslim political thought, and legal and political-economic transitions. I am currently working on two book projects. One is a short volume on Indian Ocean cities and urbanism from the early modern period to the postcolonial era. The other is a detailed study of land and property in Hyderabad City in an era of rapid urbanization from the early twentieth century to the present. Set against changing modes of regional, national, and global capitalism – from progressive Muslim rule, to postcolonial state-led developmentalism, to post-Cold War liberalization – the book examines multiple means of claiming urban land as property. It looks at how urban denizens mobilize unliberalized forms of entitlement to space – trusts or religious endowments, state land grants, community entitlement – to hold on to their place in the city in a context of large-scale dispossession of minorities and marginalized groups. The project seeks to generate wider reflections on the meaning of urban belonging in an era where an increasing volume of humanity make their lives in cities. 

I teach courses on South Asia, the Muslim world, and Global Empires, as well as thematically-defined seminars. In addition to regular offerings on South Asian history in multiple periods, my recent courses include:

• Cities and Global Connections (undergraduate seminar)

• Empire Cities: Urban Histories and Geographies of Power (graduate theme seminar)

• Indian Ocean World (undergraduate seminar)

• Islamic Civilization & Muslim Societies (undergraduate lecture)

• Modern Empires (undergraduate lecture)

• Spaces & Places (graduate research seminar)

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

• “Beyond Colonial Urbanism: State Power, Global Connections, and Fragmented Land Regimes in Twentieth-Century Hyderabad City” (2024)
• “Old Borderlands: Sovereignty and Autonomy in the Hyderabad Deccan, ca. 1800-2010” (2020)
• “Rethinking Sovereignty, Colonial Empires, and Nation-States in South Asia and Beyond” (2020)