ERIC LEWIS BEVERLEY
Associate Professor (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2007)
Curriculum vitae
Office: SBS S-359
Email: eric.beverley@stonybrook.edu
Graduate Director Email: graddirectorhistory@stonybrook.edu
Interests: Modern and early modern South Asia, Indian Ocean, Muslim world, urban studies,
law and crime, transnational history
My research explores global connections through detailed examination of particular
cities and states. Centered on modern and early modern South Asia and the Indian Ocean
world, my scholarship and teaching attends to historical links with other places (European
Empires, Muslim states and populations), and key themes in global contexts (cities,
sovereignty, law and crime). My first book, Hyderabad, British India, and the World: Muslim Networks and Minor Sovereignty, c.
1850-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) views the world from Hyderabad, a minor South Asian state under sovereign Muslim
rule. The work sketches eclectic global intellectual circuits that informed political
experimentation in areas of political ideology and diplomacy, frontier legal administration,
and urban development. The book redefines the nature of state sovereignty in the era
of colonialism, and identifies the close relationship between Muslim rule and political
modernity. I am currently pursuing research on borderlands in modern South Asia, cultural
difference in early modern Indian Ocean cities, forms of sovereignty in the age of
colonialism, and the history of South Asian cities in the modern and contemporary
periods. My current book project is a study of the urban history of Hyderabad City
c. 1910 to the present that examines the city’s expansion through the lens of urban
property.
SELECT WORKS
• "Colonial Urbanism and South Asian Cities"
• "Territoriality in Motion: Waqf and Hyderabad State"
• "Frontier as Resource: Law, Crime, and Sovereignty on the Margins of Empire"