Taimoor Shahid

Taimoor Shahid is the Mellon post-doctoral fellow on the OpenITI AOCP Phase II team. He is a multilingual writer, poet, translator, and scholar working with Persian, Urdu, Punjabi, Dakkani, Bengali, and other South Asian languages. His book-length works include The Madness of Waiting and The Dangerous Man, both celebrated English translations of Urdu classics, and A Desertful of Petals, a comprehensive concordance of Ghalib’s Urdu divan. His contributions have appeared in diverse publications like The Annual of Urdu Studies, adda, Tanqeed, 91st Meridian, Modern Poetry in Translation, Vallum Magazine, Chapati Mystery, Scroll.in, The Friday Times, and The Dawn among others.Taimoor Shahid researches the literary, intellectual, and cultural history of the medieval and early modern Indian Ocean world with a focus on Islamic ethics, cosmology, and Sufi-philosophical thought. He recently earned his PhD from the University of Chicago. His dissertation “Saif al-Mulūk, The Quest for Love: Islam, Travel, and the Ethics of Cosmopolitanism in the Indian Ocean World” examines the relationships between Islam and the ethics of cosmopolitan belonging through a historical, literary, philosophical, and anthropological study of Saif al-Mulūk, an epic romance tale of travel across the Indian Ocean World, told and retold from 11th century onwards up until today from Tunisia to Malaysia in all languages in between. Taimoor Shahid’s work has garnered recognition through prestigious fellowships from institutions like the Fulbright, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, the American Institute of Indian Studies, as well by the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies.

Beyond his research on the Indian Ocean World, his forthcoming projects encompass scholarship on topics such as the poetics and conception of bazar/marketplace in classical Persian and Urdu poetry, Quranic discourse of the apocalypse, digital analysis of ideological trends in children’s Urdu literature, and the confluence of Islamic and Indic cosmologies in Indo-Persian historiography. In other endeavors, he is building digital tools for South Asian literatures, translating a war diary from the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, and compiling collections of his Urdu and English poetry and translations.