Siraj Dean Ahmed
Assistant Professor of English and Critical Social Thought
8 Park St, 15
(413) 538-3238
Fall '07 office hours: Wednesdays and Fridays 12:30-1:30
sdahmed@mtholyoke.edu
Education
Ph.D., English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University
B.A., English and Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania
Professor Ahmed was a President's Fellow and a Whiting Fellow at
Columbia and a Benjamin Franklin Scholar at Penn. Since coming to
Mount Holyoke in 2004, he has received yearlong and summer fellowships
from the NEH, a research fellowship from the Clark Library and Center
for Seventeenth & Eighteenth Century Studies at UCLA, and honorary
fellowships from both the Institute of English Studies and the Institute
of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London. He has taught
courses at the Santa Chiara Study Center in Castiglion Fiorentino,
Italy and has presented his work at Berkeley, UCLA, USC, Santa Barbara,
Indiana, Vanderbilt, Georgetown, the School of Advanced Study London,
the Yale Mellon Center for Art London, the University of Córdoba,
and the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He has received
an excellence in teaching award and was chosen by the Mount Holyoke
Class of '07 to speak at its Baccalaureate ceremony.
Professor Ahmed's research takes place at the intersection of the
Enlightenment and Postcolonial Studies. His book project—`The
Stillbirth of Capital: Enlightenment Form & Colonial India'—reconsiders
the shared origins of modern imperialism and modern literature.
It argues that we need to see the former as the unleashing not
of capital, but rather of modern warfare, and that precisely this
anti-progressive vision informed Enlightenment thought. Working
outward from the Enlightenment and Postcolonial Studies, Professor
Ahmed's teaching ranges back to ancient texts, both European and
non-European, and forward to contemporary continental philosophy.
He is planning a second book that will tie these interests together,
setting out from the Enlightenment fascination with `pre-historical'
writing to think more carefully the present imperative that literature
and philosophy become dialectical practices beyond progress.
Selected Publications
'Orientalism and the Permanent Fix of War' in The Postcolonial
Enlightenment,
ed. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008).
'"The Power to Lend Money without Extracting Interest": Renegade
Capitalism in Late Eighteenth-Century British India' in Interpreting
Colonialism, ed. Byron Wells and Philip Stewart, a volume
in the SVEC series (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2004).
'The Theater of the Civilized Self: Edmund Burke and the East India
Trials,' Representations 78 (Spring 2002), 28-55.
'"The Pure Soil of Universal Benevolence": the Rule of Property and
the Rise of an Imperial Ideology in the 1790s,' Eighteenth-Century
Ireland 15 (2000), 139-157.
'"An Unlimited Intercourse": Historical Contradictions and Imperial
Romance in the Early Nineteenth Century,' in The Containment
and Re-Deployment of English India, ed. Daniel O'Quinn, a
volume in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series (U. of Maryland, 2000).
Teaching Schedule 2007-2008
English 101f: Colonialism & Postcolonialism
English 382f:
Topics in Postcolonial Studies: Literature and Statelessness
English
232s/Critical Social Thought 249s: Global Prehistory
English 349s: Globalization's
Ghosts: Neoliberalism and Literature
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