Professor Faisal Devji

BA British Columbia, MA PhD Chicago

I completed my PhD in Intellectual History at the University of Chicago in 1994. I was then elected Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, after which I went on to run the graduate program at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, which included schools in Tajikistan and Iran.  Returning to regular academic life in 2003, I taught for two years at Yale as a visiting lecturer and another four at The New School for Social Research in New York as Associate Professor, arriving in Oxford as Reader in Modern South Asian History in 2009.  

Research Interests

I am interested in the intellectual history and political thought of modern South Asia as well as in the emergence of Islam as a global category. In my research I have focussed on the cultural and philosophical meanings of violence as much as the emergence of non-violence as a political project. I am also very interested in the different ways in which the idea of humanity achieves political realty, particularly as the simultaneous subject and object of globalisation. My recent work deals with efforts to think beyond the nation-state and the inheritance of anarchism in the post-colonial world.

Selected Publications: 

Dr Devji is the author of four books:

Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (2013) 

The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence (2012) 

The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics (2009)

Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (2005)